CONSTITUTION OF THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION as a speech genre of the nuclear zone of the Russian legislative discourse

The CONSTITUTION OF THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION is the main speech genre of the nuclear zone of the Russian legislative discourse, which by the criterion of legal force takes the central place in the system of legal discourse and is crucial for the formation of the “linguistic legal consciousness” of our society. The premise of modeling is the notion of the legislative discourse, which is understood as a hierarchically arranged system generalized through speech genres of normative legal act texts. According to the legal classification of normative legal acts of the federal level, the nuclear zone of the Russian legislative discourse is constituted by the following speech genres: CONSTITUTION OF THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION, International Treaty, International Convention, International Agreement, Federal Law, Federal Code, Decree of the President of the Russian Federation, Resolution of the Government of the Russian Federation. The CONSTITUTION OF THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION occupies a special place and enters the nuclear zone of the first order due to a number of specific speech-genre features: 1) the nomination of the Russian Federation has evaluative and anthropomorphic character, which was established on the basis of an anthropometric study; 2) the image of the Author/Addressee in the CONSTITUTION OF THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION is convergent, which is manifested in autodialogy. The term convergent is interpreted as convergence or coincidence of two or more entities. The cumulative image of the Author/Addressee correlates with the CITIZEN – STATE opposition, which has a genre-forming potential and shows a “portrait in the background”; 3) dictum, associated with the concept of social contract and realized by means of deontic modality, reflects the function of persuasion (according to V. V. Vinogradov); 4) axiological character of the text of the Constitution of the Russian Federation is explicated through the use of ameliorative lexicon, which is not characteristic of a typical manifestation of the official business functional style.

constitution, legislative discourse, text, speech genre, genre-forming parameter, functional style, anthropometric study, modeling