The thesis is devoted to the complex linguistic analysis of communicative and pragmatic features of the contemporary English language discourse of pre-trial investigation.
Chapter 1 outlines a comprehensive working definition of the discourse of pre-trial investigation based on the generalization of linguistic approaches to the study of discourse in modern Linguistics and in English studies. The discourse of pre-trial investigation is defined as a subtype of legal discourse distinguished on the basis of constitutive characteristics and their variant realizations depending on the procedural status of interrogated persons.
The constitutive features of the discourse of pre-trial investigation which ensure its status as a separate subtype of pre-trial discourse are the global institutional goal and the goals derived from it, status-role distribution of communicants, a type of socio-communicative relations between the participants of interrogation, specificity of the chronotope, stereotypical proper linguistic and pragmalinguistic features, an institutional form of interrogation as dialogical communication with narrative inclusions.
Based on the analysis of the communicative and pragmatic specificity of DPI, certain regularities in distribution, co-ordination and change of the communicative roles of participants as the main factor influencing the meaningful and formal-structural characteristics of interrogation have been determined in Chaper 2. The status-institutional, status-categorical, categorical and operational roles of an investigator and an interrogated person have been identified, which form correlations ensuring the development of interrogation by a certain scenario. Role variants of status-institutional roles are status-categorical roles of an investigator. Status-categorical roles are implemented in categorical and operational role-based variants.
Common characteristics for roles that are preferential and non-preferential for the development of interactions in DPI have been identified. Preferential roles are marked by observance of cooperative maxims, use of positive, negative courtesy, and bald on-record strategies.
In non-preferential roles, an investigator involves conversional implicatures, presupposition as means of manipulation, violates the maxims of cooperation, combines "face-threatening" acts to an interrogated person (in the form of imperative mood, direct questions, invective speech acts with the illocution of discrediting an addressee) with means of compensation for "face-threatening" acts by lexical mitigation, subjunctive mood, polytemporality, which in combination with syntactic and stylistic techniques of polysyndeton, aposiopesis, repetitions, parallelism, ellipsis are the signs of stress during non-preferential move.
