Legal Communication through the Prism of Linguistics (Review of the Textbook by Doctor of Philological Sciences T. V. Dubrovskaya “Language as a Tool for Legal Communication: Theoretical Foundations and Text Analysis”)

Abstract

The review examines the textbook prepared within the framework of legal linguistics, the interdisciplinary scientific field, that has developed at the intersection of law and speech studies. The range of scientific and methodological problems in the manual covers important issues such as follows: principles of and requirements for legal techniques; inconsistency of terms usage in legal texts; duplication and polysemy of terms; plainness and general comprehensibility of language in legislative acts; causes of ambiguous interpretation of legal texts and their semantic structure; intratextual strategies and extralinguistic bases for courtroom linguistic textx; functioning of legal texts in social practice; the need to search for a new rhetorical ideal that meets the needs of modern court proceedings; terminological and factual errors in the linguistic description of court procedures; substitutions in linguistic studies of real legal communication by its mediatized representations, etc. The compositional and structural parts of the book are briefly described: preface; sections 1-6, covering theoretical problems and containing questions and assignments to them; section 7, aimed at teaching discourse analysis of genres of courtroom discourse; section 8, including a test to check acquired knowledge. The review emphasizes the ‘user-friendly interface’ of the book. It points out the methodological value of the model of analysis of coutroom speech genres proposed in the textbook. The significance of the analytical review of modern literature on legal linguistics presented by the author, which reflects the main domestic and English-language studies, is especially emphasized. The conclusion is that the linguistic scientific community has received a very interesting, content-rich and methodologically sound manual on legal linguistics.