ON THE TAXONOMY OF COURTROOM NARRATIVES

The study is based on the assumption about the narrative nature of courtroom discourse and aims at analyzing the structure and varieties of courtroom narrative. Courtroom narrative is defined as a way of organizing courtroom discourse whose propositional content is a story with crime event elements included in this story in their chronological sequence that correlate with reality and the speaker’s experience. Four classification criteria for courtroom narrative practices are proposed: 1) the degree of completeness; 2) the ways of description; 3) the type of determinants; 4) the way of reality representation. By the degree of completeness, there are complete and truncated narratives; by the way of description - neutral and evaluative; by the type of determinant - phenomenological and professional; by the way of representing reality - narrative construction and narrative reflection. The article concludes that the study of courtroom narrative is a promising research field, since there are avenues for researchers such as the status of interpretive schemes in the narrative, narrative structures in different legal cultures, the ratio of narrative and recontextualization.