The thesis elucidates communicative and pragmatic nature of verbal markers of suggestion (VMS) in prosecution and defense attorneys’ opening and closing statements that exert suggestion influence on the jury’s minds, thoughts, behavior and emotional states and therefore their final decision – the verdict. The thesis is conducted in the scope of modern American legal thrillers (MALT) by means of employing the methodological basis of linguistic poetics, linguistics, and communicative pragmatics.
The systematization of the main approaches to the investigation of verbal suggestion contributed to the determination of its specific manifestation directly in legal communication. It was discovered that in MALT, the outcome of the court proceedings with the participation of the jury greatly depends on verbal suggestion. This is accounted by the attorneys’ intention to influence the jury not only rationally, but also psychologically and emotionally. This intended influence forces the jurors to act, guided not by rational thinking, but rather by their feelings, compassion for the defendant, or even for the lawyer himself.
Methodology of complex analysis of the VMS in the scope of MALT made it possible to develop semantic and stylistic classification of multi-level VMS mainly in the prosecution and defense attorneys’ opening and closing statements. The research results claim that VMS both in the prosecution attorneys’ and in the defense attorneys’ opening and closing statements are realized on all speech levels: phonetic, morphological, lexical and syntactic. However, as far as the number of the VMS contextual representations is concerned, the VMS on lexical speech level turned out to be the most frequent in the attorneys’ opening and closing statements. Their suggestion function is intensified by the VMS on morphological, syntactic, and phonetic levels.
The complex communicative and pragmatic approach used in the thesis made it also possible not only to identify the role of the multi-level VMS in the realization of communicative strategies and tactics that are used by the attorneys in their speeches, but also to discover the pragmatic effect of the communicative strategies and tactics on thoughts, behavior, outlook, feelings, and thoughts of the jury. As the research results indicate, the prosecution attorneys’ opening and closing statements and the defense attorneys’ opening statements were either successful or unsuccessful in reaching the attorneys’ illocutionary goal. However, it was the defense attorneys’ closing statements that turned out to be always successful in exerting suggestion influence on the jury. Their success first and foremost is determined by the defense attorneys’ active use of the appeal to feelings communicative tactics, which is realized with the help of such multi-level VMS which exert some pressure on the vulnerable states of the jury, evoking their pity and sympathy for the defendant, as a result of which they make an acquittal. Another reason for their success is explained by the ideological intention of the authors of the MALT to reveal the disadvantages of the jury trials in the USA.
