Written judicial discourse: mechanisms of discursive interaction between the author and the reader

Abstract

In this article, the author examines the written judicial discourse of Great Britain. The subject of the study is the law report – a brief report on the judicial decision, published in open sources and judicial collections. These texts record the most important decisions of the highest courts. A detailed legal analysis and interpretation of the applicable sources of law in a court decision take the form of a compact, concise text, with an accurate and consistent presentation of the court's arguments. The texts of court reports are an example of a modern written legal language, in which the principles and norms of common law are updated again and again. As a unit of discourse, a judicial report is, on the one hand, a complex speech act, on the other hand, it is a text that carries a certain rhetorical (pragmatic) impact on the reader. Using the method of linguistic analysis, the author analyzes the representation of an event during argumentation and identifies various discursive mechanisms of interaction between the author and the reader. The author believes that such characteristics can be divided into retrospective and prospective, depending on their rhetorical impact on the reader. In particular, the author analyzes the functional status and pragmatic significance of such phenomena as indirect speech, subordinate clauses, verbs of epistemic modality. According to the author, the analysis of such characteristics can significantly complement the study of the intertextuality (dialogicity) of written judicial discourse, and accordingly expand our understanding of the formation and influence of the legal context.