Medical-Forensic Report: Legal And Genre-Stylistic Aspects Of Study

Abstract

The article is devoted to the analysis of medical-forensic report peculiarities and the problems that may arise in respect of its legal, linguistic and stylistic regulation. The linguistic and genre features of the text of an expert opinion are defined in terms of the use of language means. The authors regard an expert report as a genre of regulated official communication that includes elements of a dialogue, a questionanswer session between the customer for whom the expertise is conducted and the contractor. The fact that an expert report shall meet the demands of some specific addressee makes it a kind of actual communication and influences its content and structure. Particular attention is paid to the compositional and structural organization of an expert report, its division into strictly structurally determined parts and irregular realization of different language functions in each text part: influencing, cognitive, communicative and contact-establishing one. Forensic medicine is characterized by its discursive specificity: it combines elements of business, legal and medical speech (special vocabulary, terminology, and reference to persons). In its legal aspect, expertise procedure and expert report drafting are regulated by the rules of law (the law concerning expert activity), which must be considered, when conducting linguistic analysis.