| Keywords [eng] |
Speech acts, directives, cooperative principles, felicity conditions, legal practitioners, non-legal practitioners, legal discourse, legal TV discourse, TV series How to Get Away with Murder, kalbos aktai, direktyvai, bendradarbiavimo principai, sėkmės sąlygos, teisę praktikuojantys asmenys, teisės nepraktikuojantys asmenys, teisinis diskursas, teisinis televizijos diskursas, televizijos serialas „Kaip išsisukti įvykdžius žmogžudystę“ |
| Abstract [eng] |
The study presents directives expressed by legal and non-legal practitioners in legal TV series How to Get Away with Murder. The research aims to determine which directive strategy is more prominent in the speech of (non)legal practitioners: direct or indirect. Moreover, the study intends to overview the most common functions of directives. Finally, it briefly overviews the success of directive acts concerning context and interpersonal relationships between the speakers in legal TV context. The analysis of directives in legal context is essential since it helps to understand how legal and non-legal practitioners use language, for instance, to assert orders, commands, or suggestions. The analysis of directives included qualitative and quantitative findings and was carried out following the frameworks proposed by Searle (1969), Yule (1996), and Grice (1983). The data for analysis was collected by transcribing ten episodes of legal TV series How to Get Away with Murder, obtained from paid streaming service Netflix. The corpus was compiled, and the directives were identified using the self-made acronym system. The findings of the study indicate that legal and non-legal practitioners prefer to express directives directly. In legal contexts, the frequent use of direct directives could be attributed to the speaker’s intention to denote commands, orders, instructions, and suggestions clearly and unambiguously. In contrast, indirect directives also express commands, orders, and suggestions, but employ a more subtle approach to achieve specific communicative goals. The most common direct directive acts were requesting, ordering, and questioning, while indirect directive acts were those of suggesting, requesting, and warning. All these functions of directives highlight the strategic use of language by legal and non-legal practitioners, as they navigate conversations to achieve desired outcomes for themselves and others. The study also examines cooperative principles and felicity conditions in shaping the success and effectiveness of directives in communicative interactions between legal and non-legal practitioners. |
