Пасивът – средство за изразяване на Авторитета в юридическите текстове
The Passive - a Means of Expressing Authority in Legal Texts

Author(s): Margarita Ruski
Subject(s): Language studies, Language and Literature Studies, Morphology, Comparative Linguistics, Philology
Published by: Софийски университет »Св. Климент Охридски«
Keywords: passive; diathesis; legal; authority; pragmatics
Summary/Abstract: The research is devoted to the passive diathesis in the legal text in French and its translated equivalents in Bulgarian. The work is both theoretical and applied. The scientific relevance and originality of the work consists in the complex study of the means of expressing passivity and the reasons for their massive presence in legal discourse. For the first time, such an analysis of the category of passive is offered in relation to a specialized language, such as legal language. The challenge of the chosen topic is twofold - on the one hand, passivity, and on the other, authority - two concepts of a completely different nature (linguistic and philosophical-moral-social), the relationship between which is primarily of a pragmatic nature and social effect. The saturation of the legal text with passive constructions is impressive. The reason is mainly related to the actions of the Authorithy, which are motivated by clear intentions and goals requiring the achievement of the required result. Passive constructions are preferred precisely because of their ability to express resultativity. The development is built on several basic principles borrowed from modern functional theories. They also determine the structure of the study - passive constructions in French and their equivalents in Bulgarian are examined on three levels - pragmatic, semantic and syntactic. A corpus of original texts in French and the official translations into Bulgarian were used as the basis for the analyses. The selected material includes mainly decisions from the case law of the Court of Justice of the EU and the text of the Treaty on the Functioning of the EU (TFEU). The volume of the processed corpus (about 1500 pages) guarantees the reliability of the results obtained.

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