Linguistic features of academic, professional, and institutional discourse in the sphere of legal communication

Abstract

The aim of this study is to identify the register-based, grammatical-lexical, and pragmatic-functional differences characterizing three modes of legal discourse – cademic, professional, and institutional-consultative – in the context of intensive digitalization and multimodal transformation of the speech environment. The article examines the corpus-based realization of texts of these discursive types, collected from the Telegram platform and from law textbooks, using stylostatistical analysis based on 3,327,817 word forms and 128 parameters, of which 43 demonstrated statistically significant discernibility. The scientific novelty of the research lies in the fact that, for the first time, on empirical material of digital and printed legal texts, a comparative modeling of the linguistic structure of legal discourse has been carried out, singling out its three register-functional modes – academic, professional, and institutional-consultative – based on the calculation and comparative analysis of 44 stylostatistical parameters. For the first time, the differences between discourses on the CEFR scale (A1 = C2), indicators of narrativity and descriptiveness, indices of lexical density, coherence (through the repetition of arguments and nouns), and temporal marking (distribution of tenses and voices) have been identified and statistically verified. This allows us to reconstruct the cognitive and genre models of legal language in the digital environment. The results of the analysis show that the differences between discourses are not only of a superficial syntactic-grammatical nature, but also of a deep cognitive-communicative nature, allowing us to speak of the existence of autonomous speech worlds with a unique normative, genre, and pragmatic architecture.

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About this article

Publication history

• Received: June 10, 2025.
• Published: July 7, 2025.

Keywords

• юридический дискурс
• цифровая лингвистика
• лексическая плотность
• регистрово-функциональная стратификация
• когнитивно-прагматическая специфика текста
• legal discourse
• digital linguistics
• lexical density
• register-functional stratification
• cognitive-pragmatic specificity of text

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