„Świadomy praw i obowiązków wynikających z założenia (drugiej) rodziny”… Analiza pragmatyczno-prawna bigamicznego aktu mowy

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to conduct a pragmatic-legal analysis of a bigamy speech act. This act is a special kind of a perfomative speech event and the consequences it produces extend both on the criminal and civil law plane. The analysis will be carried out using two methodological layers - legal and linguistic. Within the first layer, the following theories developed in legal sciences will be explored: the theory of crime, the theory of marriage and the theory of bigamous crime. Within the linguistic methodology, the author will draw on the classical theory of speech acts developed by John Langshaw Austin. In the first part of the study, the author will undertake a comprehensive characterisation of the marriage vow as a specific legal act and a speech act. In the next part she will present a bigamous speech act as a type of a criminal act. Thanks to the interdisciplinary approach to the topic it will also be possible to make an attempt to develop the author’s definition of linguistic crimes, the executive act of which consists in verbalizing prohibited by law utterances in the presence of appropriate external circumstances. In the third part, the author will discuss the civil law consequences of a bigamous speech act. The work ends with a summary containing the most important conclusions from the conducted analyses.

Keywords

• bigamy
• marriage
• linguistic crime
• speech act