Indecent Utterance in Law, Linguistics and Forensic Examinations

Abstract

The article is a brief overview of the studies of the category of "indecent form of utterance" as the main indication of insult in legal linguistics. The paper shows that insult in its naive-linguistic and linguistic sense, enshrined in the term "invective", is not identical to insult as a legal phenomenon. Linguists involved in in-depth studies of invectine as it is understood by the provision of law discagree about two points : correspondence of prohibitive lexicographic tags to the legal definition of "indecent form" and assessment of (in)decency of forms in a particular communicative situation. When “indecent form” is interpretrd widely, all gross violations of speech ethics and institutional communication regulations are seen as subjects of legal liability. With a narrow approach, only explicitly cynical statements forbidden for public use are recognized as indecent. The second approach now has broader support, although among its adepts there is still disagreement about what stylistic coloring - obscene, vulgar, rude, abusive - should be considered "indecent transfer". Currently, methods of expert linguistic research of invective speech acts have been developed. One of the most authoritative of them is presented in the scientific and information manual “Forensic Linguistic Expertise in the Case of the Charges”, developed at the Russian Federal Center for Forensic Expertise of the Ministry of Justice of Russia; it has been sucessefully used for analisis of speech conflicts for about ten years. Comparative analysis of methods described in major research papers of the previous decade also demonstrates inconsistency in the actions of experts from various institurions concerning indecent wording, which, of course, requires research by the Russian expert community to develop a uniform approach to the analysis of conflict utterances.