Authors

Public opinion polls conducted in the USA during the last several decades show that lawyers have plummeted in public esteem. The author of the article draws attention to the reasons of such a sharp decline emphasizing the so-called “cultivation effect” from the films about “bad” lawyers. Contemporary American filmmakers and writers believe that most Americans dislike lawyers, so they make movies and write books about dishonest lawyers because they are more likely to resonate with viewers/readers. Popular culture “teaches” people to construct a view of reality by means of information derived from its works. The numerous “bad” lawyer movies along with some other factors have contributed to the decline of the public image of lawyers. The article provides examples from different popular movies and books where representatives of the legal profession are portrayed as people who lack honesty, mercy, loyalty to clients and their harmful habits often interfere with their professional life. Movie and book characters are difficult to classify on the binary bad-good scale because it’s their nuanced characterizations that keep viewers interested. TV lawyers are more positively represented because they need to make people feel empathy with them and watch such shows each week. It might happen that the cultivation effect caused by the positive TV lawyers portrayals swamps the cultivation effect of negative lawyer movies.

As our society moves further into the age of digital document production, more issues will arise as to textual and non-textual infringement of copyright. The author of this article, which is dedicated to authorship attribution in the forensic context, believes that it is necessary to situate the very idea of author, which involves a number of archetypal images, with novelist being the most notable one. The populist conception of the author stems from the romantic period and seems to have changed little from that time. Apparent success of current author matching methods (such as the High Frequency Lexicon test, different computational methods) hides a number of defects because the author’s space is a public one and prone to occupation by other genre authors. Authors can either identify their work with the works of prominent same-genre authors, or stand in opposition to particular members of the genre group. Authors themselves can demonstrate inconsistency in their idiolects under the influence of social changes. Genre is viewed as a cognitive schema with underlying linguistic, sociological, and psychological assumptions. The boundaries between genres can be fluid with cross-genres or hybrid genres emerging as a result. Both the homogenizing nature of genre and individualistic features of the author style yield to the inevitable forces of social and personal entropy (decay) and ectropy (growth).

The author examines compositional and stylistic features of law-related posts as a cross-genre of popular legal discourse, functioning in a virtual setting. Posts comprise hybridity of different types and levels. The combination of verbal and non-verbal elements makes posts polycode and enhances the impact of the online media text on the target audience. Legal terms and professional expressions are implanted into the texts of posts (linear hybridization). Much attention is given to multiple intertextual connections, represented by the use of allusions and cross-genre inclusions. Elements of institutional and personal discourse are intertwined, which is characteristic of virtual discourse. A mention is made of verbal indicators of popular legal discourse, which enables the reader/listener to easily identify and typologize the communicative situation as law-related. A wide variety of figurative and evaluative tools (emotionally colored words, fashionable words, metaphors, rhetorical questions, etc.) is employed by text authors to make a profound emotional impact on the target audience. The main goal of the articles of the post genre which belongs to computer-mediated popular legal discourse is to popularize the law and convince the audience to follow its norms, which determines the choice of appropriate discourse strategies and tactics.

The article deals with the typical means of personal deixis encoded in the texts of popular legal discourse, as well as the techniques that a scientist as a popularizer uses to construct his image. Popular legal discourse is viewed as a kind of popular science discourse with a number of distinctive features inherent in scientific communication. The authorial position in the text under analysis is impersonal, which is typical of scientific discourse, but the popularizer demonstrates greater freedom and variability of expression due to the less rigid stylistic framework of the popular science discourse. The combination of certain strategies of scientific and media discourses employed by the author, enables him to manifest high competence and professionalism in his field and at the same time establish some personal contact and convey the necessary legal knowledge to the audience of nonspecialists. Personal narrative, including subjective assessment of the events described, allusions to precedent court cases and known criminals, as well as the use of various stylistic devices, are powerful and efficient means to achieve various purposes and goals, namely, encouraging interest in legal knowledge in the future. The concepts verbalized by the author of a law-related popular science article are relevant for legal discourse.

Science popularization is undergoing significant transformations, including changes among popularizers themselves, which leads to the diversification of communication strategies and a shift in functional potential. The article deals with the strategies employed by the journalist author in the text of a book on law as a genre of popular science legal discourse. Two key popularization strategies that contribute to the implementation of the author’s communicative intention, and enable the agent not only to activate background knowledge of the target recipient, but also influence their axiological attitudes are analyzed and described. The right choice of popularization strategies makes special information accessible to the recipient and directly affects the effectiveness of the perception of a popular science text. The informative-explanatory strategy is used by the popularizer to interpret key legal concepts. The strategy of manipulative influence enables the agent to influence the target recipient by presenting special information from a certain angle. The conclusion is drawn that a contemporary popular science book on law does not only contribute to the public legal education but also shapes a reader’s ideology.