Intralingual Conflicts of the Legal Language

Abstract

In the article, the author studies the problem of interaction between the legal language and other professional languages, using the language of psychiatry as an example. In this context particular attention is paid to the lawyer’s skills to manage conflict situations that appear between the legal and other languages. The courtroom, in particular, presents a “conflict place”. The author poses a question: what happens when it is required of an expert-psychiatrist to give an opinion on criminal sanity of the accused? While modeling the possible further development, it becomes obvious, that there is a huge gap between the language of psychiatry and the legal language, which appears because of the contradictions between the natures of these two fields. In each mental and linguistic system, whether an academic discipline, a professional or informal language, there exist its own set of terms, its own structure, goals, social and cultural context. The author points out that the lawyer and the psychiatrist constantly deal with two conflicts: the conflict between their professional language and the reality, and the conflict between the psychiatry and the law as such. The article notes that the nature of such contradictions requires a special approach to each individual case and combination of the art of legal language and other languages.