Opposition of official and ordinary interpretations of the law (cognitive aspect)

The article focuses on the peculiar features of the official and ordinary interpretations of the law in the cognitive aspect (in terms of linguistic interpretationism). A fundamental feature of ordinary interpretation is variability of understanding and interpretations of the meaning of legal texts and terms determined by objective linguistic factors and individual psychological characteristics of the recipient. In the process of interpreting the ordinary native speaker has to deal with a kind of functional juridical version of the Russian language as an independent subsystem. Legal language cannot be translated into the ordinary Russian language by an elementary way - by spontaneously generated codes existing in ordinary consciousness. The special quality of legal language is determined by the collision between antinomian existence of natural language, natural laws of its existence, semantic nets of linguistic units and imperative legal texts and rigid semantization of linguistic units used in legal language. This leads to the fact that the understanding of the rule of law by ordinary native speakers does not always correspond to the legal idea laid down in the text of the law by the legislator with potential communicative failures as a consequence. The possibility and the degree of communicative failure are magnified when the legal text and the legal term as its component are simultaneously combined by special and ordinary semantic components. Coincidence of ordinary words with the specific terms causes difficulties for their practical understanding by ordinary native speakers, because the ideas typical to ordinary consciousness do not ambiguously match specialized presumptions. As a result, the content of the term may be represented in the mind of the recipient with a various degree of fullness of understanding of the term, its accuracy and depth. It depends on the situation, context, types of consciousness and levels of the preparation of the subject of interpretation. At the same time perlocutionary effect of real functioning of legal terms in the ordinary consciousness of Russian native speakers may differ significantly from the intentions of the author - intention of the legislator. On the basis of experimental data the article has examples showing that the ordinary interpretation of legal terms is characterized by plenty of versions of interpretation which do not always coincide with their official ones. We can distinguish two trends of the ordinary interpretation: 1) a word in the mind of the native speaker has more meanings than registered in legal dictionaries; 2) the number of meanings registered in dictionaries is richer than in the linguistic consciousness. Furthermore, the structure of the semanteme differs - the hierarchy of nuclear and peripheral meanings.

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