Legal Vocabulary as a Means of Conceptualization of Cultural Communicative Situations by Aristocrats in Marcel Proust’s Novel

Abstract

The author of the article argues that during the Third Republic French aristocrats used legal terms figuratively in their communication as is evidenced in Marcel Proust’s novel. The paper presents legal terms which, used metaphorically and in similes, create a certain cultural code for the personages’ private communication. Communicative situations (secular and political) employing figurative legal terms whose meaning can be perceived only by French aristocrats and their closest social circle, creating a special code for message exchange, served as material for our study. In order to describe these situations, Marcel Proust resorts to general legal vocabulary, the terms of Constitutional Law, Civil Law, International Public Law, as well as some concepts of the history of the French Law. The main methods of our study are semantic, linguistic, stylistic and contextual types of analysis. The relevance of our article could be justified by the fact that, to our knowledge, there are no scientific papers on stylistic devices, based on specialist terminology, in a literary text, or in communication. Linguists are interested in the functioning of specialist terminology as well as in the issues of classification and analysis of different stylistic devices. With regard to the stylistic analysis, we may say that the Guermants, the personages of the novel, are capable of impacting the opinion of their interlocutors in many subtle ways, just like journalists impact the viewpoints of their readers while covering political events in the news. For this purpose, they also resort to different delicate and ingenious techniques, such as play on words, aiming at belittling someone in the eyes of others. The inability of the readers to understand the meaning of some of their statements featuring legal terms to refer to some larger cultural and communicative situations, is one way for the Guermants to underline their own uniqueness, treating the people around them in terms of in-(out-)group members. Numerous communicative situations related to the figurative use of legal vocabulary allow the writer to represent Marcel’s disappointment by the aristocrats’ world he is now familiar with, as well as his misunderstanding of Baron de Charlus’ sensual hints, and total incomprehension of the new modern art by the Duke of Guermants.