The use of learned words in legal discourse: an imposition of gender

Abstract

It is proposed to examine the lexicon present in the judicial proceedings of juridical institutions which are represented by public prosecutors, lawyers and judges. Both judges and pre-service judges show their anxieties in relation to the erudite lexicon in judicial proceedings. It is understood that the use of a lexicon in which Latin expressions and archaic words occur, might be understood in the light of such an approach. We were based on the presupposition that the lexical choice someone makes when working out a statement is related to the coercion of the genre. Thus, it is believed that the lexical units that occur in petitions are submitted to this type of coercion. Bakhtin’s and Mangueneau’s sayings concerning genre are adopted, for both take the language aspects into consideration, in its relation to social and institutional activities. Considering that the lexicon that calls our attention in petitions is quite vast, it will be delimited, having as the object of this work only the statements in which the lexical units diapasão and ad argumentandum tantum occurs. These words were chosen for being quite frequent in the petitions examined.