the semantic and lexical evolution of divorce throughout the history of french legislation

• DOI: 10.14762/jll.2020.048
• Publication Date: 2020-09-10
• Authors: Ieda Maria Alves; Isabelle Oliveira; Beatriz Curti-Con...
• Keywords: 05 social sciences; Arts and Humanities: French and Francophone Language and Literature: French Linguistics; Law: Law and Society; divorce, semantic-lexical evolution, legislative changes, France, diachronic terminology; 0509 other social sciences; 16. Peace & justice

International Journal of Language & Law (JLL), Vol 9: Forensic Linguistics: New Procedures and Standards<br/>The dissolution of marriage has not always existed in the French legal field since marriages were under the control and influence of the Catholic Church for a long time. It was only in 1792 that the term “divorce” first appeared in French law in order to designate the concept of the “dissolution of civil marriages abstracted from the prerogative of death of one of the spouses and religious issues”. After the introduction of this concept into the French legal context, there were legislative changes regarding different divorce situations over the following years. In the light of these facts, this paper examines the semantic and lexical evolution of the term divorce in the domain of French law, relating this evolution to socio-cultural and historical aspects of France between 1792 (when the divorce was instituted in the country) and 2017 (when the most recent legislative change on the subject occurred). The present study is based on the theoretical and methodological assumptions of Terminology (Cabré, 1999; Barros, 2004; Krieger & Finatto, 2004), particularly on the perspective of Diachronic Terminology (Dury, 1999; Tartier, 2006). Based on the results of this investigation, it is possible to affirm that the evolution of French society has leaded to the transformation of the legal domain that, in turn, has created new concepts that caused the semantic and lexical evolution of the terminology designating types of divorce in France since the eighteenth century.<br/>