STRATEGIES AND TACTICS OF THE DEFENSE ATTORNEY IN THE AMERICAN JUDICIAL DISCOURSE

Abstract

The article deals with the discoursive strategy implemented by a defense attorney in American court proceedings. This study covers the definition of the global and local strategies of the defense lawyer, the identification of a set of his speech strategies and tactics. The relevance of the research topic is determined by the applied complex communicative and discoursive approach, based on the postulates of which it is possible to define and study the strategies and tactics of the defense lawyer in the American court session and to establish the parameters of their variation. The work contributes to solving an important scientific task of modern linguistics – clarifying the relationship between the role of the communicator and his discoursive strategy and identifying the influence of collective and individual factors on the strategic direction of the speech actions of the communicator in the strict institutional conditions of such an important link of the legal system as the court. The object of the study is the statement of defense lawyers in the American court, and its subject is the strategies and tactics implemented by them during the court session and the parameters of their variation. The purpose of the study is to establish the global, local, speech strategies and tactics of the defense lawyer in the American court session and to reveal their variation depending on the situational factors and the discursive personality of the lawyers. The strategy implemented by a discourse participant is based on his declarative and procedural knowledge of rights and obligations stereotypically associated with the role of this participant. Thus, the main goal of the defense lawyer is to convince judges of the truth of their own judgments, which leads to the emergence of a global discoursive strategy – a strategy of persuasion. In order to convince the court, the judgments, statements and conclusions of the defense lawyer must be logical and consistent, which causes the strategy of logical persuasion to be singled out as a local one that concretizes the global strategy. Since the court speech of the defense attorney represents a logically constructed line of argumentation, this makes it possible to affirm the presence of speech strategies in the model of the discoursive strategy of American courtroom discourse: rational and emotional argumentation.