THE GENRE OF “LAW”: SYNTAX PARAMETERS (BASED ON THE CIVIL AND CRIMINAL CODES OF THE FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF GERMANY)

Abstract

Laws are classifi ed as texts of offi cial business style, which is used in the fi eld of offi cial public relations. Within the framework of the offi cial business style, the communicative infl uence on the participants of communication is carried out in a directive form with the help of regulatory documents – laws, prescriptions, instructions, regulations, etc. The general features that defi ne the offi cial business style are stylistic neutrality, impersonality, concreteness and objectivity. Regardless of the specifi c genre, they are all characterized by a high frequency of professional terminology, brevity and standardization of the presentation and structuring of the material. The syntactic organization of the genre of “law” in German is analyzed based on the material of the Civil and Criminal Codes of the Federal Republic of Germany. It has been confi rmed that this speech genre belongs to the offi cial-business style with typical features of a generalized representation of events, an instructional-informative type of text, a neutral presentation and a specifi c language design. The offi cialbusiness- style is characterized by saturation with professional terminology, brevity of the presentation, standardized form and structuring of the material. A genre is defi ned as a thematically, compositionally, and stylistically established type of messages, united by a number of characteristic repetitive features. The law as a genre is characterized by a set of linguistic and non-linguistic features that are reproduced and repeated in the laws of various types of German law. This concerns the structuring of the text of the law, the repertoire of specifi c designations – articles, paragraphs, paragraphs and sentences, fonts, as well as purely linguistic representation at the lexical and syntactic levels and the specifi city of stylistic devices. Typical syntactic features of the text of German laws are the presence of a large number of verbs, substantives, prepositional groups, modal verbs (können, dürfen, sollen), passive constructions, etc. These linguistic units contribute to the condensation of the text and allow avoiding complex sentences, and clearly convey the modality of permission or prohibition. Other structural features of laws are the productive use of anaphora, defi nitions, and syntactic parallelism, which form a special architecture of the “law” genre and distinguish it from related genres of legal discourse. Possible further research is the analysis of the lexical features of the genre of “law”. Key words: law, genre, offi cial-business functional style, German language, syntax.