Legislation texts in the genre aspect: the problem statement

The article aims to study legislation texts and its basic structural, content and functional genre-formative parameters. The study is based on the author's understanding of legal discourse. Discursive functions of legislative texts include: informational, regulatory, policy, design, impact. The legislative text is defined as a special form of presentation of legal information, and a special way to create a legal reality. The study material is the texts of Russian laws (the Constitution of the Russian Federation, federal laws, regional constitutions (charters) and laws) and monuments of Russian law (Russian Truth, Council Code 1649, Pskov Judicial Charter 1467, First Code of the Basic state laws 1832, Code of Fundamental Laws of Land 1906 and others). Works of philologists and lawyers are analyzed. The author describes some of the features of the emergence and development of the concept of law and legal texts. In particular: separation of legal traditions from juridical, ethical and religious customs; overall functionality and themes of various acts; procedures ritual; narrow and broad understanding of the law; written fixation and development of legal language. Yu.M. Lotman's conception of correlation between culture and text is analyzed in this paper. The Russian law system is viewed as a set of legislative texts and text classes. Russian laws (federal and regional) are of generic relations. The author identifies general and specific linguistic and extralinguistic parameters of the genre of the legislative text. The genre-formative parameters include: functional, content, formal. According to the author, the general linguistic features include: the combination of linguistic units of one register, generality, terminological consistency, speech patterns and structural patterns. Legislative texts differ from other legal texts: texts of decrees, regulations, orders. The author analyzes the problem of the internal typology of legislative texts and highlights the subgenres of basic and transforming laws. The concept of a legislative intertext is used in the study of the material. Particular attention is paid to the name and structure of transformative laws. The legislative text loses its text property (static) and acquires the properties of legal discourse: development in time, focus on enforcement, extralinguistic parameters of creation and perception of the text. The methodology of this work includes theoretical approaches, such as a system-structural method, an interdisciplinary method, a genre approach, comparative and source study methods. The novelty and the findings of the author's research are concluded in the opportunity to detect and classify an array of existing terms which are applicable to the issue of texts of laws. Results of the study are important for the development of the theory of genres, document-text legal linguistics. The conclusions of the author can be used to conduct further research on this issue.

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