Abstract
The article focuses on practical experiment on perception of argumentative nature of court opinions by non-native speakers. Several argumentative frames most frequently used in the texts of court opinions are identified and described in the article. The article also aims at analyzing the distribution characteristics of the identified frames. Text of court opinion not only performs informative and performative functions, but also reflects the socio-pragmatic setup of the author. A definite set of communicative senses is reflected in the respective modus functions forming a specific meta-category of modus in the judicial discourse. The function of this meta-category is to specify facts through the synthesis of the objective (that is, legally justified) and subjective (which include the position of the court, or of the judge) components of argumentative frame. Key words: Meta-language, argumentative frames, distribution of frames, judicial discourse.
Highlights
Discourse as an object of research has undergone a difficult way of development, but so far has no complete, exhaustive definition of discourse have been worked out
The present paper considers theoretical aspects of argumentation in judicial discourse, methodological basis for the analysis is the anthropocentric approach, which allowed the use of a combination of cognitive, linguistic, and functional-semantic analyses to identify and provide integral description of argumentative structures in the text of the court opinion
The respondents perceived the given discourse fragments as argumentative, and were able to distinguish different degree of “argumentative intensity” of the proposed fragments, which basically corresponded to their position in the text of court opinion
Summary
Discourse as an object of research has undergone a difficult way of development, but so far has no complete, exhaustive definition of discourse have been worked out. There are two main areas of research within which the concept of discourse can be defined: formal "language above sentence level” (Schiffrin, 1994) and functional "situational language in use” (Brown and Yule 1983). The discourse, considered as a form of language use, deals with the study of linguistic structures and components, distribution of these structures in the dynamics of discourse unfolding, models and principles of their incorporation into larger constructs. “Structural descriptions characterize discourse at several levels or dimensions of analysis in terms of many different units, categories, schematic patterns, or relations” (van Dijk, 1985). Description discourse from structural perspective can help identify different relationships and modalities determining the discursivity of sentence sequence or other constructs, their internal relationships and principles governing their compounds
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