THE LANGUAGE OF PROFESSIONAL KILLERS

Abstract

The author has considered the language of professional killers as a professional language. It has been indicated that legal psychology in some areas of research is also based on the achievements of legal linguistics, in particular on psychological linguistics, where the concept of linguistic identity takes the prominent place in categorical apparatus. The linguistic portrait – is the linguistic identity of a definite social community embodied in the language. From this perspective, psychologists are primarily interested in those features of linguistic identity, bearing the features of group identity. And interests of legal psychologists are focused on the social community of people, whose activities are in some way connected with the law, including criminal and deviant individuals. To this regard the objective of this article is to determine the psychological characteristics of the language of professional killers.

A number of specific examples of such a language and the definition of professional killers as a particular social group have been provided. It has been proved that a specific feature of the language of killers is euphemization of their professional terminology. The explanation of this from the psychological point of view is the origin and attempts to overcome the cognitive dissonance between criminal behavior and social ban of murder that has become as persistent attitudes in the society – has become a taboo behavior and transformed into stereotypes of behavior. Reducing the dissonance is typically achieved by the fact that in many cases designation of the “murder” is replaced by others, softer and more vague designations as “physical elimination”, “higher degree”, “liquidate”, which are aimed at easing certain estimates of violating social precepts by the criminals and sometimes to justify these violations. In Besides, a characteristic feature of the language of killers is the direct killers (concerning their victims) or hidden verbal aggression that aims verbal impact on the recipient in order to change the attitudes about the actions of criminals.