How not to Act with Words, or About Criminalised Speech Acts from a Legal and Linguistic Perspective

Abstract

The aim of the article is to analyse criminalised speech acts from the perspective of two research methodologies: criminal law and pragmatic. Acts of this kind have not yet been subjected to thorough, collective research, although they are relatively frequent both in the basic acts of Polish criminal law – the Penal Code and the Misdemeanour Code – and in specific acts. The article focuses on code examples and the considerations undertaken in it are part of jurisprudence – an interdisciplinary science combining aspects of legal sciences and linguistics. The speech acts penalised on the grounds of criminal law, i.e. offences, have been analysed from the point of view of three fundamental research problems: their criminal law status, the conditions of their fortuity and the communicative intentions of their perpetrators. The explanatory procedure was based on an attempt to reconcile legal and linguistic elements in order to explain the essence of criminalised speech acts and to indicate their characteristic features. The juxtaposition of the theories of locution, illicitation and perlocution with the corresponding elements of the theory of crime was of particular importance in this respect. The author has also attempted to determine the social rank of criminalised speech acts as one of the ways of human action in the world – an action which, due to the threatening, often very severe criminal law consequences, is worth refraining from.