Representation of expert knowledge in institutional discourse practices

A jury trial involves both legal professionals and laymen without legal training and knowledge. This heterogeneity of participants indicates the asymmetric relationships in the courtroom. Since jurors play a crucial role in the trial, it is extremely important for them not to experience difficulties in understanding and interpreting the discursive practices of lawyers. The paper studies the discursive strategies and linguistic means of expert knowledge representation in the institutional genre of "judicial instructions." Although regularly used to overcome knowledge asymmetry in the process of communication between professional lawyers and jurors, explanatory strategies in the Russian-language judicial instructions have not previously been the object of linguistic analysis. The hypothesis has been put forward stating that explanatory strategies help to overcome difficulties in understanding and interpreting legal texts by non-professional participants. The analysis of the corpus has shown that Russian judges use the following explanatory strategies to overcome cognitive and communicative problems amid the knowledge asymmetry: 1) definition, i.e., explication of the meaning of a term by indicating its distinctive features; 2) description, i.e., a narrative transfer of expert knowledge by establishing its connection with everyday knowledge; 3) exemplification, i. e., an appeal to the everyday experience by correlating legal categories with specific objects or events of everyday life; 4) metaphorization, i.e., interaction between two objects or phenomena based on their subject, feature, or functional similarities resulting in legal categories approaching the everyday experience; 5) synonymization, i.e., replacement of abstract legal concepts with everyday lexical units that have similar meanings.