The pragmalinguistic analysis of legislative genre (based on texts of german laws)

Abstract

As a rule, legal genres are subdivided into three large thematic groups: “Legislation” (laws, regulations, instructions, acts, orders), “Case law” (judicial decisions, appeals, protocols, court orders and court inquiries), “Official documentation” (official correspondence, reports, contracts). This research focuses on the pragmalinguistic and linguo-stylistic analysis of German legislative texts. The authors describe the characteristics of legislative genres and single out their general and special language functions. The relevance of the article is based on the fact that in Russia and abroad there are few linguistic papers on the analysis of legislative genre and law texts. In the meantime, the given research direction is highly prospective for interdisciplinary studies. The authors argue that the function of nomination, the function of message, the function of influence and the function of communication are vividly manifested in legislative genre via multilevel language means. A pragmatic analysis of the legal norms of the German legislative texts shows that the latter are characterized by imperative and dispositive legal norms, while recommendatory legal norms for the texts of German laws are less typical. The methodological base of research includes contextual and functional analysis, linguo-stylistic techniques as well as descriptive and linguo-pragmatic methods of analysis.

Keywords

• legislative genre
• pragmatic language functions
• legal norms
• intention
• pragmatic analysis
• nomination
• linguo-stylistics
• extralinguistic factor