Axiological component of defense speech in judicial discourse (based on English defense speeches)

Authors
KOROBOVA E.A.
Affiliation
The Military University of the Ministry of Defense
Issue 56
Pages
62-86

The article is devoted not only to value judgments, but also to the issue of forming an assessment of the addressee in legal defense discourse. Legal defense discourse is understood in this study as a set of communicative practices of a lawyer aimed at resolving legal disputes during court sessions, which are regulated by law and norms of interaction within the contextual boundaries of time and place. The topicality of the present paper is determined by the need to expand the knowledge of the axiological features and patterns of linguistic mechanisms that form the basis of legal discourse in general and defensive speeches in particular. The aim of the article is to reveal and describe the ways of features of assessment formation in the defense speeches of English-speaking lawyers in the English legal discourse. The material of the study is the English-speaking lawyers’ legal defense speeches of the early 20s of the XXI century. The research was conducted with general scientific methods and techniques of material selection and systematization as well as types of analyzing language phenomena (communicative-pragmatic, contextual analysis, discourse analysis). Besides being clear and trying to avoid ambiguity in his speech a lawyer presents considerations to the court in favor of the defendant only; he often makes great efforts to look, for new means of speech influence in order to provoke a positive attitude towards the defendant. Having analyzed the linguistic material, the author finds and describes axiological components that expand the subject of discussion in the tactics used by English-speaking lawyers (tactics of targeted influence, tactics of indirect rhetorical influence and tactics of abstract influence), mainly with the help of expressive means (metaphors, epithets, phraseology and so on) while visualizing the necessary association in the addressee.

For citation

Korobova, E.A. (2024). Axiological component of defense speech in judicial discourse (based on English defense speeches). Issues of Applied Linguistics, 56, 62-86. https://doi.org/10.25076/vpl.56.03

This artiсle is available under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.