Extralinguistic determinants of subject representation in legislative texts

The article is devoted to the problem of verbalization of the speaking subject in legislative discourse. The author states that the ways of positioning the speaking subject, determined by the types of political systems, were undergoing the changes through the ages. The mechanism of the government is considered to be crucial when choosing the ways of representing the speaking subject. The article also deals with the language units used to verbalize the speaking subject in legislative discourse. The author arrives at the conclusion that during the last millennium the subject in legislative discourse used different ways of self-positioning: both the explicitness of an author’s identity and its full elimination from discourse, depersonalization of utterances.