The functioning of phraseological units in texts of court decisions in criminal cases (on the material of the German language)

Abstract

This article is dedicated to the study of phraseological units in texts of court decisions in criminal cases within the German legal system. The research objective is to identify legal phraseological units that repeatedly appear in a fixed form in the analyzed legal documents and hold a specialized meaning in terms of professional language. The authors distinguish types of fixed expressions and clichés, organizing them based on their usage in various structural parts of court decisions. The research novelty lies in the first examination of the characteristics of phraseological language tools in the sphere of legal practice based on German court decisions, shedding light on issues related not only to the construction of court decision texts but also to the influence of the content of structural elements on significant text characteristics of legal documents. The analysis revealed a specific set of professionally marked phraseological units regularly present in the examined texts. It was also found that such linguistic clichés act as distinct markers of the compositional organization of court decisions, representing the thematic content of corresponding sections (headings and thematic blocks), predominantly presented either as multi-word terms or as functional verbal constructions and collocations.