La phraséologie juridique dans le discours public. Le rôle éducatif des médias

Abstract

This paper concerns the sequences of words, i.e. nominal or verbal phrases conventionally established in the legal language, e.g. judicial sentence, presumption of innocence, testify in court, give evidence under oath, etc., which have been often analysed by linguists as units that could be placed between casual phrases and fixed ones. These collocations are frequently cited in the daily press or in other media : television, the radio, the Internet. The journalists who communicate news to the public intermediate between jurisprudents and non-professional receivers. They often act as interpreters who are capable of explaining an expert’s opinion to lay people in order to develop their competence to understand the rules of law and to participate in judicial and administrative actions. The author of this paper focuses on the measures of exporting legal expressions to media discourse and on the educational aspect of this process as well as on the influence of legal categories carried by idioms and collocations on the today’s society: on our interpretation of facts and our language. The process has also a negative consequence at the level of text style that is too marked with juridical terms as well as in the cognitive sphere since when you evaluate facts and people’s behaviour, you tend to prefer the legal viewpoint to, for instance, the equally important ones: moral, political, cultural, etc.