The Russian language legal discourse: offences сommitted verbally

Abstract

The article dwells upon topical issues of the terminological space of the contemporary legal linguistics, namely the concept of the offence committed verbally which is actively used by researchers and practical experts. There is no generally accepted definition of this linguistic and legal category in contemporary scientific and methodological literature which results in variations in its understanding. The articles of the Criminal Code of the Republic of Belarus were used as practical research material. The methodology of the article included the method of overwhole selection of the material and its statistic processing, discourse analysis, systematization and, partly, parameter, semantic and stylistic analysis. In the present paper, the verbal character of the offence is considered through the prism of evaluating the object of legal control which, for the considered type of offence, is the text in the widest sense. This approach is to complete the terminological lacuna and to prevent the emergence of duplicating notions (for example, verbal crime). Accent, which is made on the object component of the misdemeanor, makes it possible to identify three types of such offences, committed: 1) mainly verbally (they dominate in criminal law); 2) often verbally (quite frequent but twice as rare as the first type mentioned in the Criminal Code); 3) verbally (quantitatively compared to the second type). The research findings are considered to be significant for the development of the terminology apparatus of legal linguistics on the whole and linguistic and legal expert studies in particular.

Keywords

• legal linguistics
• linguistic expert studies
• verbal crime
• offence committed verbally
• Criminal Code of Belarus
• Administrative Offence Code of Belarus
• terminology
• verbal way of misdemeanor
• verbal contact
• communicative linguistics