Analytical Article on Legal Issues: Interrelation of Sociopragmatic and Communicative Characteristics

With the expansion of media discourse the number of hybrid discourses, functioning in close interaction with it, is increasing. Legal media discourse utilizing media practices involves a broader audience in comparison with legal discourse. The heterogeneous nature of legal media discourse influences the ways the goal and strategic and tactical apparatus is implemented in the genres within it. The article considers implementing the main communicative goals, strategies, and tactics in the genre of analytical article on legal issues as a representative of legal media discourse. The study uses the texts of English-language analytical articles on legal issues published in electronic versions of the daily editions of The Guardian, The Times, The Financial Times, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal for the period from 2015 to 2022. The paper formulates the value dominant of the genre under study: forming elite legal consciousness. This dominant takes into account the intended audience of the analytical article on legal issues and determines its goal and strategic and tactical characteristics. The main communicative goals of the genre under study are identified and described: informing, explaining, influencing, and developing the recipient’s heuristic potential. To describe the strategic characteristics of the analytical article on legal issues, the authors identified a set of principles such as analyticity, reliability, striving for objectivity, persuasiveness, heuristics, accessibility, individuality, and multimediality. The combination of these principles presents a general communicative media analytical strategy. Following this strategy, addressees of the genre apply different communicative tactics.