The Phenomenon of Axiological Enantiosemy in Legal Discourse

Abstract

The article is devoted to the effect of the evaluation factor in legal discourse. The evaluation factor is considered to be the central one providing the connection of conceptual (cultural-axiological) foundations with the communicative dynamics of discourse. Assessment can become an area of study of the complex mechanisms of the relationship between culture and pragmatics in human speech activity. Evaluation is considered to be an immanent factor of human social existence. Human life is impossible without an evaluative attitude to reality. In any sphere of life, a phenomenon, an event, an act are subjects to evaluation, all events are subject to correlation with the norms of social relations and culture. Assessment reflects a person’s position in the system of social relations, his life attitudes: what he strives for, what he denies and what he treats neutrally.
The examples of legal judicial polemics show, on the one hand, the central status of evaluation in the teleology of a speech act, and on the other hand, its high mobility and semantic independence. Evaluation needs, on the one hand, subject verification (factual justification), and on the other – moral justification (compliance with cultural norms). This relationship is observed with a high degree of clarity in the speech units of legal discourse (in texts, statements), where pragmatics and the general axiology of evaluation can come into conflict, forming the so-called semantic, or axiological, enantiosemy of legal discourse. There is an internal content asymmetry in the speech signs of discourse, which is actively used by the parties to the trial in the context of legal controversy in order to strengthen the semantic impact on the court. The judge makes the decisive final assessment.
The article may be of interest to specialists in the field of general linguistics, semiotics of discourse, communication theory, and researchers in the field of judicial rhetoric.