ARCHIVE STATEMENT AS A PRAGMASEMANTIC FOCUS OF COURT DEBATES

Abstract

A universal scheme for analysis of court debates has been developed and its worth hereafter attested. The discourse of court debates has been found to be organized around the point or part of the point of a business contract that arouses disagreements of its interpretation by the sides of the contract. Following the ideology of Foucalt’s L’archelogie du Savoir, such point / part of the point has been termed ‘archive statement’. The latter organizes the court debates argumentation both topically and structurally. Compliance with semantic and pragmatic content of the archive statement helps to develop effective strategy in terms of argumentum ad rem. Evasion or distortion result in a loosing debate strategy. Linguistically, competing sides of the court debate have been viewed as discourses of discrepancies while the arbiter as the discourse of expert community. Discourse of court debates has been reconstructed on the basis of the text of the court’s verdict.