Transfer of Legal Knowledge to the Narrative Space of a Work of Fiction

Abstract

The object of this study is hybrid discourse as a result of the integration of language markers and concepts of legal discourse and literary narrative. The subject of the study is the techniques, mechanisms, and means of transfer involved in the formation of hybrid discourse. The transfer of legal knowledge into a literary text is the process of transmitting knowledge marked by the legal sphere into the narrative space of a literary text in order to model the image of a female judge, identify professionally significant personality characteristics and internal contradictions integrated into a personalised concept of morality. The purpose of this work is to study verbal tools of the knowledge transfer, implemented by the language markers of legal discourse and units of a literary text in the process of formation of a heterogeneous text that is the result of functioning of hybrid discourse. The study is conducted with regard to linguistic, psycholinguistic, cultural, logical-philosophical, and cognitive-discursive approaches to the analysis of knowledge transfer and involving the structural-semantic method, methods of contextual and conceptual analysis, as well as more specific methods of profiling, component analysis, etymological analysis, etc. The authors refer to The Children Act, a novel by the British writer Ian McEwan. The thematic core of this work is the moral issues of family law and religious differences between representatives of different confessions and Judge Fiona May’s personified moral and psychological search, dealing with issues of law, personality and society, parenting, life and death. The personal model of behaviour is reconstructed in this study and it reflects professional knowledge and skills, speech characteristics, ethical and moral prerequisites of behaviour, and relationships with others that become a conceptual component of the judge’s activity. This model is regarded from the perspective of the theory of transfer of legal knowledge in the space of a literary text. The authors identify the knowledge transfer mechanisms (inference, (de)focusing, metaphorisation, adjectivisation), the main transfer techniques — textual (reverse editing, syntactic dominant, perspectivisation, antithesis, emphasis) and lexical-semantic (transformation of word meanings, semantic implications, actualisation of word etymology, profiling of individual components of meaning), and means of transfer — linguistic realities (extended context, sentence, word, seme). The selected techniques and mechanisms of transfer manifest themselves at different levels of language: semantic, syntactic, and linguo-pragmatic. The inclusion of linguistic markers and concepts of legal discourse in the space of a literary text creates a single heterogeneous context in which the significant semantic and axiological characteristics of the personified model of the morality of the judge of England are represented. The authors make a conclusion about the mutual influence of the two marked discourses.