DEFENSIVE CLOSING ARGUMENT AS A SYNTHESIS OF INSTITUTIONAL AND PERSONAL DISCOURSES

Abstract

The topicality of the research follows from the need to identify the place of a defensive closing argument in the speech information space of the court session. The object of our research is the modern successful American defensive attorney’s speeches. The subject of the study is the institutional-and-personal discourse features of modern successful defensive closing argument. The purpose of the study is to identify the signs of personal and institutional discourses in a barrister’s speech. The paper uses general scientific methods, namely abstraction, analogy, elements of analysis, synthesis, induction and deduction, which provide theoretical substantiation of the results and conclusions of the intelligence. As a finding of our research, the main approaches to the interpretation of the concept of «discourse» have been considered; the criteria of differentiation of different types of discourse have been studied; the heterogeneous discoursive characteristics of the defensive speech have been revealed. The practical value of the results obtained is appropriate in teaching English stylistics, general linguistics, textology and jurislinguistics. It is concluded that the barrister’s speech is a special type of institutional-personal discourse, since it combines the features of both types of discourse.