THE ROLE OF THE BARRISTER’S SPEECH SYNTACTIC ORGANIZATION IN EXERTING A MENTAL IMPACT ON THE JURY (on the material of the contemporary English defensive speeches)
The article investigates the role of syntactic organization of the contemporary English defensive speeches in exerting a mental impact on the jury. Any oratory is an instrument to influence the listener’s consciousness. The high degree of its appellativeness is largely conditioned both by the personal characteristics of the speaker, and the compositional-and-communicative peculiarities of his speech. A defensive speech is a kind of oratory which combines the emotive-and-rhetorical influence over the judiciary audience with the sequence of logical reasoning that leads the jury to a particular verdict. In this case, the right syntactic organization of the compositional parts of the barrister’s speech provides for the mental impact on the jury and court audience and contributes to its efficiency. The article proves that the defensive speech is marked by a specific structure, with each of its parts having certain syntactic characteristics and a communicative intention. A conclusion is made that the use of complex sentences is typical of the introductory and the informative parts, and the final part is characterized by the increasing usage frequency of simple sentences, which ensures the coherence and persuasiveness of the barrister’s defensive speech altogether.