Contribución al léxico constitucional de 1978

Resumen

If there is a feature which characterises the process of writing of La Constitución Española de 1978 that is, without any doubt, the ‘magic’ word «consenso»; with the general agreement of all the political parties which were involved in this period of the Spanish History, known as «The Democratic Transition», the final text moves, almost paradoxically, between an intentional ambiguity and a lexical preciseness. Examples like the word «nacionalidades» («nationalities»), which continues today to cause serious problems in semantic interpretation; or the compound noun «derecho-deber» («Right-Duty»), which is the most important new concept within the constitutional text, could be some of the signs of this dichotomyc situation that we are describing in the present article.