FUNCTIONAL ASPECT OF LEXIS’ CORPUS “ROGUE LAWYER” (BASED ON THE BOOK BY JOHN GRISHAM “ROGUE LAWYER”)

Abstract

The paper addresses the analysis of the lexis used for verbalization of lawyer’s professional activity described by John Grisham in his work “Rogue Lawyer.” The words used for lawyer’s professional activity are approached as uniform corpus of nominative units. The paper focuses on the corpus content and the research of functional peculiarities of its nominative units is offered. The approach to classification of the lexical corpus used by the author for description of lawyer’s professional activity is based on content-analysis procedure. The latter presupposes the fracturing of lexical corpus into specific categories differentiated according to part of speech they belong to. The researched corpus of lexical units contains nominal, verbal, and adjectival / adverbial / participial categories. The obtained data point at their definite mode to explicate the semantic characteristics and the functional potential of each lexical unit analysed. As the result it was determined that the distribution of the units within the corpus of lexis adheres to the principle of functional-semantic field and their smaller fragments – micro functional-semantic fields. Thus, it is inspected that the corpus of lexis used by John Grisham in his book “Rogue Lawyer” splits into four functional-semantic fields: “Lawyer,” “Client,” “Trial,” and “Tools,” which involve the smaller components − micro functional-semantic fields.