ETYMOLOGICAL MEMORY OF A WORD IN TERMS OF RECONSTRUCTION OF THE CONCEPT OF “REASONABLE AUTHORITY” IN ENGLISH FAMILY LAW

Abstract

The normative space of legal discourse does not only contain norms of various types and functions - regulatory and constitutive, formal and non-formal - but also implicates general value-based benchmarks of both social behavior of society in general and the representatives of political and state power and their “way of thinking”. The article considers the correlation between the etymology of the English word, used in the text of legal discourse, and the cognitive reconstruction of the meanings of the concept «reasonable authority» on the example of Family Procedure Rules used in England and Wales. Etymological memory of a word is viewed upon in this study as a «mobile determiner» of the context, able to modify the conception of the UK judiciary. The etymology of a word should reveal the deep semantics of lexical units, uncover inferential characteristics and show the connotations of the word. The article argues that there is direct relationship between the illocutionary power of the utterance and the expressiveness of the etymology of the words constituting a legal language expression. The English «reasonable authority» becomes an ambivalent construct: on the one hand, the etymology of the names under analysis reveals the traces of «authoritativeness», but on the other hand, - «authorship» of the judiciary as a representative of the British political system. The “development” of some nomination units shows contamination of semes or, on the contrary, extension of lexical meanings. Comparative analysis of the modern meaning of the word and the components of etymological memory, registered in lexicographic sources of the 19th century, is the main research method in this study.