Aspects of studying the motive “play in court” and its linguistic representation in a hybrid literary-legal discourse (based on the novel “Bleak house” by Charles Dickens)

The article focuses on a narrative motive (in particular, the motive of “play in court”) as a plot-forming and meaning-generating component of a hybrid text. The interaction between two discourses representing the legal conceptual field and the field of artistic and aesthetic skills is accompanied by the formation of a uniform space in which knowledge is transferred from the legal field into the literary text. The functioning of the narrative motive in the text is investigated in various aspects including axiological, pragmatic, functional, semantic and cultural ones, in order to generalize knowledge while modeling a single image of the object of reality. The research material is the novel “Bleak House” by Ch. Dickens where the dominant storyline (against the background of the other two) is legal and describes an endless litigation. The “play in court” in this work, being a stable and dynamically developing element of the narrative, acquires additional connotations and new meanings in the rhizomatic environment of the text functioning in a hybrid discourse. The work emphasizes that the narrative motive “play in court” is a fabulously expressed component of the narrative, designed to reveal the “malice of the day”. In this research, the author draws conclusions on the peculiarities of the functioning of this motive in the novel and identifies semantic transformations that transmit new knowledge about the legal reality of the 19th century.