Formal and Semantic Organization of Hybrid Literary-Legal Discourse

Abstract

The research is carried out through cognitive-discursive paradigm in language learning using the methods of cognitive-discursive, conceptual, contextual, structural-semantic, component, definitional and etymological analysis. The article defines the concept of situational equivalence and sets its parameters in a hybrid literary-legal discourse, which is formed in the narrativedocumentary space, dealing with the content of the novel by I. McEwan “The Children Act” and the real law of 1989, adopted by the British Parliament. At the same time, the hybrid literary-legal discourse, marked - due to the interpenetration of two conceptual spaces - by intertextuality and interdiscursivity, is considered to be a special socio-cultural practice designed to reveal urgent social problems and highlight them not only from a legal, but also from a humanistic aspect. The narrative model of literary-legal discourse is emphasized to generalize the elements of five levels of its formal and meaningful organization: 1) the surface structure of the text (event series, factual information); 2) the “semantic core” of the content; 3) detailing or generalization of the description of the situation; 4) grammatical means of expressing the meaning; 5) proto-text (non-literary text that formed the basis of a literary work; here - “The Children Act”). The concept of situational equivalence is interpreted taking into account three parameters: the identity of the main essential properties of conceptual spaces and their functions; the equivalence of situations from a legal point of view (constant parameters); the presence of additional connotations (variable parameter). The subject of this research is the linguistic markers of legal discourse and the units of a literary text, considered in a comparative aspect from the point of view of their situational equivalence. We also speak about full and partial situational equivalence from the point of view of the presence or absence of the connotative potential of the studied thematic units. The presented conceptual theory is demonstrated by the example of the concept REASONABLENESS, which explicates the idea of rightness (seriousness, correctness, rationality) of professional actions of judicial representatives and their decisions. It is noted that the interpretative potential of this concept is significantly expanded due to the integration of language markers of legal discourse into the narrative space of a literary text; reliance on prototext allows us to identify thematic units of hybrid literary-legal discourse that make up the “semantic core” of the analyzed conceptual space. Due to the fact that the concept obtains additional connotations in the semantic structure of the literary text, thus, the corresponding fragment of the conceptual space of the legal document is also enriched. The study of the concept REASONABLENESS as a special dynamic complex of specific properties and characteristics shows the process of modeling a cognitive phenomenon in the process of hybridization of two conceptual spaces (literary and legal).