On the Addressee as a Key Category of Courtroom Discourse

The article analyzes the role of the addressee as a category determining courtroom discursive practices of legal professionals. The material for this study was texts of closing arguments of Russian and American lawyers available on Internet websites as well as transcripts of closing arguments written by the author in court sessions. It is emphasized that the idea about taking into account the addressee's role runs through the works of many Russian and foreign researchers (W. Chafe, G.G. Clark and T.B. Carlson, R. Stolnayker, N.D. Arutyunova, T.V. Chernyshova, et al.). However, the problem of the addressee in courtroom discourses has not been studied yet. The important role of this factor makes it necessary to take into account effects of the addressee on the discursive construction of the world, to identify the main linguistic and cognitive mechanisms optimizing the communicative interaction of the speaker and the addressee in the courtroom. The focus on the Other, taking into account peculiarities of its phenomenological experience and knowledge makes legal discursive practices dialogical, intensifies their interactive characteristics. Special attention is paid to the linguistic cognitive mechanism "transition from the term to the notion", which allows the formation of the common interpretation context in the process of communication of professional and non-professional participants of courtroom proceedings. Clarity of judicial speeches is determined by the ability of the speaker to take into account the addressee and switch from the language of the expert community to the language of lay people, define legal terms through lay concepts. The scientific novelty of the research is due to the choice of the research trajectory which is based on the issue of the addressee's role for producing courtroom discourses. The issue of discursive interaction and methods of its optimization is significant for sociolinguistics and communication theory. The article concludes that the perlocutionary effect of speech is determined by the degree of orientation of the speaker towards the addressee, the adequacy of the addressee's hypothetical image. Mutual understanding is the result of joint efforts of interlocutors aimed at harmonizing individual points of view. In order to establish contact, the speaker must have a correct image of the addressee using information about their social and cognitive status, worldview and emotional attitudes.

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