Communicative politonality of contemporary Russian popular legal discourse

Abstract

The research focuses on a pragmalinguistic analysis of popular legal discourse texts and identifying their communicative tonality determined by the communication situation and individual features of the speaker’s linguistic personality. It is revealed that the model tonality of the hybrid discourse under consideration is the informative communicative tonality, aimed at providing the non-expert addressee with patterns of behavior in specific legal situations. However, unlike the pre-programmed tonality of the basic legal discourse, the dominant tonality of popular legal discourse is often subject to re-accentuation. Thus, the invariant informative tonality can be combined with humorous, ideological, fascinative and other types of tonality as “overtones” of the dominant tonality. It is shown that irony based on the contrast between the explicit and implicit meanings of the author’s statement is the most frequent mode of re-accentuation in the texts of the discourse under analysis. A change in tonality, which engages the emotional memory, facilitates the perception by the non-expert addressee of complex specialized information during its linear unfolding in the text. The author also establishes a direct connection between the ideological tonality of popular legal discourse and Russian cultural values.

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