The Issue of Objectification of the Understanding of a Controversial Text within Forensic Linguistics

Based on the example analysis of a controversial text, the article addresses some linguistic phenomena making it challenging to interpert the texts, such as implicit expression of meaning, the incompleteness of the formal sentence structure, the presence of polysemantic components or linguistic components that require particular semanticizing or cognitive understanding. To precisely understand the controversial text and justify the results of linguistic research, it is necessary to overcome the mentioned factors’ negative influence. The meaning content of the analyzed text is twopronged: part of it has a non-explicit expression and involves a level of presuppositions of the text; therefore, the author of the article projected this content plan onto the communicative structure of the text using a description method based on the theory of rhetorical structures. As a result, an implicit content plan of the controversial text and the interpretation of its main controversial semantic components are presented. The analysis actualized several problematic issues related to the objectification of understanding a controversial text, which so far cannot be explicitly resolved. It is primarily the problem of the acceptability of the use of implicit information in a forensic perspective and the problem of eliminating the variability of the semantic understanding of controversial texts, the content of which is not explicit enough.

Abstract licence: CC BY

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