LINGUISTIC EXAMINATIONS IN THE LAW ENFORCEMENT DISCOURSE

Abstract

The article contains analysis of legal basis for linguistic examinations of the effective regulatory documents as a part of legal procedure and for the purpose of interpretation of certain legal concepts in legal activities. It has been established, in particular, that the subject of linguistic analysis of the texts of laws upon lawyers’ request is typically verification of meaning of terms and nonterminological vocabulary, less frequently – clarification of true meaning of syntactic constructions violation of formulation standards of which makes precise construction impossible. Forensic semantic and textual study of the text provided as a part of legal procedure is conducted in accordance with the standards established in Regulations on Scheduling and Conducting Forensic Examination and Forensic Studies and Scientific Guidelines on Preparation and Scheduling Forensic Examination and Forensic Studies approved by the order of the Ministry of Justice of Ukraine. Linguistic examinations not included in the legal procedure are conducted by an expert philologist qualified in the sphere of linguistics that is necessary for evaluation of the regulatory document text using internal methods. In this article methods of linguistic expertise of regulatory documents have been studied, which methods can be applied in terminological, lexico-semantic and logical and syntactic elaboration of the draft bill texts. The author suggested, in particular, a semantic-textual examination of the copyright related terms, lexical meaning of words or word combinations used in the texts provided for examination that are used in Ukrainian statutory instruments (notional lexical units and auxiliary parts of speech). The author noted that such studies must be conducted in view of the context the terms, lexical units and word combinations that become an object of the linguistic examination are used in. It has been established that the reason of request for linguistic examination is the need to clarify the meaning of terms and non-terminological vocabulary related to the legal procedure or non-judicial legal practice.