Communicative operators in court speeches
The article is an analysis of communicative operators occurring in court speeches. The model for the present author — owing to its analysis of the indicated exponents of the text in connection with the functions of language — is the classification of communicative operators proposed by Grażyna Habrajska and Aleksy Awdiejew. The article is based on an analysis of twelve recordings of court speeches eight in criminal and four in civil proceedings delivered during a rhetorical contest for lawyers organised in 2012, six of which — among them the winning speech in its entirety — are included in an annex.
The material thus compiled has been analysed with regard to the occurrence in court speeches of ideational operators, discourse organising operators and interaction operators. The author has concluded that despite obvious differences between civil and criminal proceedings, a typical set of communicative operators for both types of speeches remains basically uniform. The only difference that can be observed concerns the frequency of occurrence, with hierarchisation operators predominating in criminal proceedings speeches and metatextual operators — in civil proceedings speeches. Thus, when compiling the most frequent communicative operators in court proceedings with regard to dis-course organisation and interaction operators, the author does not specify the type of court proceedings unimportant feature in the “table of typical operators” included in the annex, assuming that in the structure of a model court speech the set of communicative operators remains a universal class.