Professional Discourse of Lawyers: Informal Forms of Communication (Based on Social Network Communities)

The article aims to describe the corpus of Internet texts functioning in professional communities and personal profiles of lawyers in social media, as part of an informal legal discourse. The theoretical background and methodology for this study are based on socio-constructivist and critical discourse analysis approaches. We define professional discourse in this study as a cognitive model that reflects extralinguistic parameters, is implemented in the form of professional practice, includes a set of verbal and non-verbal statements, constitutes the professional environment, and is constituted in other professional practices. For a text to qualify as belonging to informal legal discourse, it must meet the following criteria: 1) the text implements one of the categories that set up the social and communicative dimension of the cognitive model of professional legal discourse; 2) at the same time, the text can significantly deviate from stereotypical forms and ways of expression on the textual level. The leading approach applied is discourse analysis, which includes standard methods of communicative-pragmatic and semantic analysis, as well as content analysis, which provides semantic categories as parameters of the socio-communicative level of the model and units as typical lexical markers. The data include 300 texts of various styles and genres, constituting the content of professional legal groups on the Instagram and Facebook social networks: Internet memes, narratives representing the description of cases of professional practice. The data analysis revealed that the basic and independent categories, which can be expressed singly and do not require the presence of other categories, include thematic content and social roles of participants and objects. The most expressed and independent categories are “thematic repertoire” and “social roles of participants”, as they are the ones that subordinate and build relationships with other categories. Within the “social roles” category, the lawyer and client are the most widely presented and developed, which allows us to consider them nuclear. Professional actions directly depend on the social roles of the subjects, they are predictable and quantitatively limited. At the same time, within the framework of the presented model, the category “professional actions” plays a dominant role. This is because, by virtue of predicativity, it most exhaustively conveys information about the model and allows us to supplement the model with missing elements, such as the nature of the action, subjects, object, goals, time and place. The analysis revealed that the model of professional communication of lawyers is implemented incompletely in informal communication, based on the principle of “family resemblance”. This leads us to suggest the prototypical organization of discourse.

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