The genre of uklad in the written criminal discourse

Vollständiger Abstract

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The article describes criminals’ set of rules (uklad) as a speech genre functioning in the written criminal discourse. Uklad is regarded as an institutionalized genre reflecting deontic meanings based on criminal ideological notions. The study is based on 12 handwritten texts confiscated in various penitentiary institutions of the Russian Federation from the early 2000s to the early 2020s. The aim of the work was to identify constitutive genre features of uklad. The author describes illocutions and intergenre connections, highlights images of communicants, determines the propositional organization of uklad, semantic and functional features of the criminal norm, the aspects of its linguistic embodiment. As a result, it was determined that uklad is not only intended for normative coercion, but also contributes to the criminal socialization of an individual. To this end, it borrows the genre features of a religious sermon and a political slogan. The paper shows that the author of uklad is a bearer of the criminal ideal and the recipient is characterized by a desire to approximate to such an ideal through submission to the criminal norm. It is proved that the dictum content of such criminals’ codes is the situation of uklad presuming the existence of an actant in space at the social and everyday levels, in time, either eternal (associated with ethical prescriptions) or current (regulating everyday situations). The criminal norm is based on the axiologically motivated dominants of “criminal”, “human”, “non-human”, “common”, “personal” and is embodied as an ethical obligation. The language of such criminals’ codes represents criminal normative dominants through regular conventional metaphors, as well as special graphic symbols (the use of capital letters, the system of underlining), presupposes stylistic contrasts and special graphic symbols and is characterized by a desire for standardization and “literariness”.