Communicative Tactics and Strategies in Divorce Proceedings: The Legal Linguistic Aspect

Abstract

The article investigates the relationship between communicative motives and the process of divorce from a jurislinguistic perspective. The article examines how communicative factors influence the decision to dissolve a marriage. The aim of the article is to identify the primary communicative motives that lead to the dissolution of marriage and to understand their interaction with the legal aspects of the divorce process. Exploring these interactions can help improve communication in such situations, as well as increase the effectiveness of legal interventions related to marital dissolution. Methodology, methods and techniques. The article applies discursive, lexico-semantic, contextual method of analyzing communicative tactics and strategies. The legal-linguistic analysis of divorce discourse implies the use of argumentation methodology, methodology of cognitive interpretation of legal text and discourse, methodology of analyzing the formal and semantic structure of linguistic elements and text-forming categories. Results. In the process of jurislinguistic analysis we have identified the primary and auxiliary strategies and tactics in divorce proceedings. The primary strategy of judicial communication is persuasion as the most significant strategy in terms of motives and goals, since it is the court that decides the outcome of the dispute in divorce proceedings. Auxiliary strategies are: deconstruction strategy, strategy of interpreting reality, emotionally attuning strategy, rhetorical strategy, dialog strategy and others. Communicative-psychological motives for the dissolution of marriage can be the loss of interest of spouses (communicative conflicts, misunderstanding, indifference, aggression), infidelity, beatings, lack of care for joint children and many others. We consider it necessary to develop a special jurislinguistic methodology, using the communicative-discursive potential, which would declare a strict mechanism for taking into account the motives of action of all parties and would implement an algorithm of correlating communicative tactics and strategies in order to successfully reconcile the parties. The scientific novelty of the study consists in addressing the jurislinguistic discourse of divorce proceedings in order to identify communicative tactics and strategies as a basis for the development of jurislinguistic methodology that uses the communicative and discursive potential. The practical significance of the study lies in the use of the primary findings to create a communicative toolkit that improves the results of the judicial process.