Last Wills and Testaments as a Socially Motivated Speech Action (Based on English Last Wills and Testaments of the Mid Xix – Early Xxi Centures)

Abstract

A Last Will and Testament as a legal document of Inheritance Law is of particular importance for the life of modern societies of all developed and underdeveloped countries. However, the study of the genre of legal discourse has hardly been the object of linguistic research. The article focuses on the analysis of the study of English Last Will and Testament as a social and communicative phenomenon which reflects socially determined needs of a testator in the situation of bequest. English Last Wills and Testaments often illustrate individual experience, every day life, social relations and even power. They also touch upon the questions of moral values in the society: evaluate right versus wrong, justify decisions, intentions and actions. The article presents an attempt to cover one aspect of the genre research, namely performative speech acts which are typical for wills. Genre performative modelling is carried out and it is proposed to consider English Last Will and Testament to be a complex performative. It is revealed that three types of explicit performatives singled out by J. Austin are common for wills: 1) I verb that; 2) I verb to; 3) I verb. Performative speech acts have been singled out: exersitives show the decision of a testator about the distribution of property to a certain person and appointment of executives (bequeath, direct, give, order, direct, declare, devise, leave, further, appoint, nominate, constitute, empover, vest, entitle, assign); expositives reveal the act of revocation (revoke, (make) void, rescind, annul, disallow); commissives express inclination to a certain action (request, declare my intention). The novelty is given to the analysis of Last Will and Testament as a social and communicative phenomenon which is generated in the situation of bequest. A method of lingual and pracmatic interpretation was applied in the article. A model of analysis has the following structure: communicative intention of a testator → act of bequest → linguistic means to carry actions in performative speech acts. The corpus of the research contains 400 Last Wills and Testaments written between 1837 and 2015 in England.