Glavni pravci u proučavanju jezika prava

Abstract

In this paper we have presented the most important tendencies when analyzing legal discourse in the fi elds of Serbian and Serbo-Croatian language studies at the end of 20th and at the beginning of 21th century. The legal discourse has been the subject of interest for both lawyers and linguists, even though, for the longest time, this subject has been connected with lawyers exclusively. The importance of language has been highlighted in research papers as well as general law manuals. The use of language in the sphere of law has been studied within the fi eld of nomotechnics, a specialized branch that deals with the practical techniques of making legal documents. Additionally, there have been several specialized manuals directed towards lawyers, which deal with the subject of introducing exemplary laws. On the other hand, as far as linguistics is concerned, legal discourse has been traditionally studied from the perspective of functional stylistics, primarily using general manuals where one can note the major characteristics of this style as well as the most important linguistic features of the administrative and legal discourses. More recently, scientifi c papers that scrutinize a specifi c corpus and combine functional stylistics with other disciplines (primarily discourse analysis and pragmatics) have been published. A notable advancement can be witnessed in the increasing number of studies that deal with legal discourse from the perspectives of discourse analysis and pragmatics, in addition to contrastive studies, studies of terminology and lexicology, corpus linguistics, didactics of Serbian as a foreign language, etc. Keywords: language, law, linguistics, administrative and legal register.