THE CONCEPT OF LEGAL DOCUMENT IN THE PROFESSIONAL SPHERE
Authors:   Saint-Petersburg State University, Troshchenkova E.V. , Rudneva E.A. ,   Institute for Linguistic Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences
Published: March 2023

The article aims at analyzing LEGAL DOCUMENT within the framework of conceptualization to create specific forms of mental representations such as scientific concepts. This specific case is used to model the formation of special knowledge and diagnose the problems that the expert community may encounter when using the classical attribute approach with binary oppositions in the content of the defined concept. We tried to show how both in written and spoken discourse lawyers fail to find common and essential features, which would unite all the elements included in the concept of LEGAL DOCUMENT and simultaneously differentiate it from documents of non-legal nature. Despite the fact that the phrase “legal document” is repeatedly mentioned in textbooks on the theory of state and law, often a self-evident expression, legal researchers admit that the concept of LEGAL DOCUMENT is difficult to define and there is a lot of controversy about it within the professional community. The study considered a) fragments of theoretical works (articles and monographs) and textbooks with explicit definitions of “legal document” and discussions of definitions by other authors, as well as other contexts of using “legal document” in scientific legal discourse and legal documents themselves; and b) oral statements of practicing lawyers on their understanding of what a “legal document” is - fragments of 5 semi-structured interviews. Cognitive-discursive and socio- and anthropolinguistic approaches were used for material analysis. Structural, lexical-semantic and conceptual analysis of the proposed definitions and quasi-definitions, as well as conversational analysis of the interviews were carried out. Individual statements were further considered in the broader context of reasoning about the problem, taking into account the general logic of argumentation development, the coherence/inconsistency of judgments both by different speakers and in the reasoning of one speaker, contradictions of examples of the formulated position, focusing/defocusing. Conversational analysis also took into account hesitation markers, prosody and extralinguistic multimodal data to reason about mental processes of the interviewees. The study shows that we seem to be dealing with an attempt to delineate with the traditional logical definition the boundaries of a scientific concept, which is based on the pre-existing and well-formed fragment of everyday knowledge, having slightly different structure and resisting such definition methods. As a concept of everyday consciousness, it would seem productive to describe the LEGAL DOCUMENT from the position of family resemblance as a fuzzy set of partially overlapping elements (without uniform feature(s), or some of them being a continuum of graded parameters). Such mental representation could be conveniently described through the idea of prototypes with good and bad examples of the category. However, the lawyers in legal discourse intermittently try to use the concept as one of everyday consciousness and a scientific formation and are not fully aware of the degree of difference. As a result, we see how logical contradictions in the professional discourse are intensified.