EN
The article discusses the linguistic status of specialist vocabulary, as well as the procedures used for its identification and description. Our theoretical analysis is based on a selection of penal law texts. The purpose of the article is to define the notion of legal text unit and to prove its relevance for linguistic research. The paper presents the relationships between a legal text unit, a language unit, a collocation and a term. We sug-gest that in order to identify specialist language units, the analysis should be based on a corpus consisting only of texts representing each particular field. Finally, the article discusses the basic mechanisms used for transforming general language units into legal language units.