THE GENRE INITIAL PETITION AND ITS STYLE: THE JURIDICAL LANGUAGE IN DIFFERENT LEVELS OF LITERACY

Abstract

ABSTRACT

By means of legal texts, it is seeking to interpret the laws, ensuring their fulfilment and even create them. Thus, it becomes essential that non-professionals individuals of this field could also understand them, in order to participate more actively of social life exercising their rights and performing their obligations. Therefore, we would have the accomplishment of one of our current Federal Constitution foundations, laid down in article 1º, subsection II, which is: Federative Republic of Brazil is supported by the fundamental principle of citizenship. Due to the importance of the Law to society, since is the instrumental by means of which it attempt to harmonize, as far as possible, social coexistence and legal texts, we write this thesis. Our motivation arose by observing the difficulty of comprehension of the general population in relation to juridical genres caused, mainly, by excessively technical and far-fetched language which are elaborated. As a result, we seek to investigate if people who do not work professionally in the legal area can understand those texts, as well as if the language(especially the vocabulary) used on it complicates or prevents those people comprehension; is also our aim investigate how the level of literacy influence in the process of comprehension. Our research was developed around a specific juridical genre, which is the initial petition. It is a classic discursive genre in the legal sphere, because is used to initiate the civil law suit. We utilize Bakhtin's philosophy of language (2011) to theoretically substantiate our discussions about this genre, what allowed us to trace the outline of it on the basis of the three theoretical pillars proposed by this author theory, which are: thematic content, compositional structure and style. Based also on Bakhtin (2011), we discuss language as verbal and dialogic interaction and, thus, support our discussions about the sphere of juridical discursive production and textual comprehension. Still with respect to the process of comprehension, we also based on Marcuschi (2011). To discuss the concept of literacy and juridical literacy, we utilize Soares (2004a, 2014b), Rojo (2009), Tfouni (1992) e Kleiman (1995). We explain the initial petition, from the juridical point of view, from the contributions of Didier (2015), Marinoni (2015) and of the Civil Procedure Code – Law nº 13.105/2015. About the data collection methodology, we had the participation of 08 persons, who formed 04 groups: Elementary School, High School, Higher Education and lawyers (control group). We deliver to the participants the text relevant parts of an initial petition chosen by the researcher and, with them, a questionnaire with personal questions and questions about textual comprehension. After reading the text and reply the questionnaire dully answered, we carry through a semi-structured and audio recorded interview in order to complete the answers in the questionnaire. In general, our results shows difficulties on textual comprehension of the participants, manly, the Elementary School ones, except the control group (lawyers), with the main cause, incomplete alphabetization, low level of literacy as a whole and lack of juridical literacy.