Legal and linguistic aspects of determination of offence (on the material of the text linguistic examination).

Abstract

The article is devoted to research of conflict speech acts and their legal qualification. On the material of newspapers` publications, the conceptual analysis of the word «libel» as a legal definition used for determination of certain type of offences is carried out. The point is grounded by the fact that the concept «libel» contains the next four obligatory semantic components: 1) action controlled by the actor completely depends on his purposes and intentions; 2) artificiality, falsehood of the given information; 3) negative information about somebody or something; 4) the spread information is considered as violation of universal moral norms. At linguistic examination of arguable text all these semantic components should be taken into account: only in the presence of all four components the information can be considered as a libel. It is concluded that despite the applied nature, the expert research of the text can’t be properly executed without the use of the scholarly apparatus of modern linguistics possessing the huge explanatory potential which should be used as the evidential basis at the solution of legal tasks connected with legal regulation.