The article examines the semantic structure of the legal term. Nowadays, with the rapid development of cross-cultural communication, people, while pursuing their professional career, learn specific languages, including the language of law, with terms being its important component. Terms can often impede the process of successful cross-cultural communication so teaching cross-cultural communication, according to many researchers, including P. Cranmer and K. Koskinen, is immensely important. The article aims to demonstrate that a legal term, a word or phrase used in legislation, is a generalized name for a legal concept that may lack a precise meaning in practice as it is polysemous. To proof this statement, the semantic structure of the legal term is studied from the cognitive point of view. The key terms (term, frame, lexico-semantic variant of a word, microframe (reference category)) are defined at the beginning of the article. The article also describes the classification of various semantic structures of terms developed by Prof. Belyayevskaya, based on an analysis of the cognitive foundations of the typology of semantic structures as well as on the classification of meanings. They are homogeneous semantic structures, with different lexico-semantic variants of a polysemous word representing different aspects of one microframe; these structures include monosemous terms, polysemous terms with a homogeneous semantic structure, and terms with the intermediate type of lexemes. Heterogeneous semantic structures are semantic structures, with a lexico-semantic variant of a word representing two or more reference categories rather than one category; these structures are considered to be “classical” polysemy. Two types of such structures are introduced in the article, with examples of the actualization of their lexical meaning in speech being analysed (there were used examples from the British and Russian National corpora; official legal documents and English and Russian law texts) and polysemy of legal terms being explained. The research is based on legal terms represented in Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, New Large English-Russian Dictionary, English-Russian Comprehensive Law Dictionary and Black’s Law Dictionary. The study implements definitive, contextual, conceptual, and contrastive analyses. The results of the study may be used in lexicography, in teaching English to law students and in translation and interpreting training.

legal term, microframe, microframe (reference category), semantic structure, English language, Russian language