PRAGMATIC FUNCTIONS OF LANGUAGE MEANS IN MODERN ENGLISH LEGAL DISCOURSE

Abstract

The article presents a comprehensive study of the pragmatic functions of linguistic means in contemporary English legal discourse. The aim of the study is to identify the pragmatic functions of lexical, grammatical, syntactic, and discursive linguistic means in contemporary English legal discourse, to determine the specific features of their realization in legislative and judicial texts, and to establish their role in shaping normativity, argumentation, and the interpretative potential of legal communication. The research material consists of English legislative and judicial documents selected from the official legal resources EUR-Lex, UK Legislation, the United States Code, and the historical corpus The Old Bailey Proceedings Online, comprising more than one million word tokens. The study employs discourse analysis, pragmalinguistic analysis, functional stylistic analysis, contextual analysis, descriptive analysis, and elements of quantitative analysis. The findings demonstrate that the pragmatic potential of contemporary English legal discourse is realized through the interaction of legal terminology, deontic modality, definitional constructions, passive syntactic patterns, complex subordinate sentences, speech acts, intertextual relations, and genre-specific discursive strategies. It has been established that legal terminology ensures precision and professional unambiguity in legal nomination, modal constructions express obligation, permission, prohibition, and legal liability, syntactic structures organize the logic of legal prescriptions and the conditions governing their application, while discursive devices contribute to legal argumentation, interpretation, and the legitimization of judicial decisions. The study further reveals that the realization of pragmatic functions is directly determined by the genre of the legal text: legislative documents are characterized by the predominance of regulatory, directive, definitional, and prescriptive functions, whereas judicial discourse is dominated by argumentative, evaluative, interpretative, and declarative functions. The findings broaden current understanding of the linguistic organization of contemporary English legal discourse and may be applied in further research in legal linguistics, pragmalinguistics, discourse studies, functional stylistics, corpus linguistics, and translation studies