A CONTEMPORARY ENGLISH DEFENSIVE SPEECH IN THE LIGHT OF SPEECH ACT THEORY
The article investigates pragmatic features of the barrister’s defensive speech and their role in successful implementation of the speech impact on the jury. The author proves that in spite of the composition of a barrister speech formally covering a sequence of procedure evidence, it actually deals with programming the jury on making a positive for the speaker decision. The communicative-and-pragmatic method used in the work permitted to single out a number of utterances in accordance with their speech intention, namely, informatives (explicatives, argumentatives, affirmatives), requestives, directives, and elicitation. Their functioning in different parts of the defense speech has also been studied. By using the appropriate pragmatic type of the utterance within his oratory, the barrister implicitly appeals to the court audience to justify the defendant. We have found out that mostly the barrister uses in all three parts of his speech affirmative statements, which together with explicatives in the introduction and the main part of the speech confirm argumentative thesis about the innocence of the defendant in the final part. At the same time, the use of requestives, elicitations, and directives serve for providing and maintaining contact of the speaker with the judicial audience, ensuring this way efficiency of the speech impact on the jury.