Właściwości stylistyczne poradnictwa prawniczego w internecie w aspekcie kulturowym

This paper focuses on the highest frequency lexical resources within the area of online legal counselling. The research corpus included the content of discussions held around specific problems of legal and judicial character and the attempts to find practical solutions to those problems, found on the Internet forums. The texts in question were classified here as utterances of a legal commentary character and stemming from the legal and judicial language, in opposition to strictly legal communication, which is normative and depersonalized in its nature. This paper takes a closer look at the act of counselling as a linguistic action in both Polish and German linguistics, as well as the characteristics of a specific-content Internet discussion forum as a separate, well-defined genre of text functioning within the world-wide-web and oriented towards the exchange of views and gathering information on a specific topic. Besides their knowledge-broadening functions, these forums are nowadays more frequently becoming the sites for initiating social contacts and interactions. The paper is cultural-contrastive in its character, as the analysed material comes from two parallel sources: Polish and German texts. It aims at identifying discrepancies as well as regularities in online legal advice, including specific lexical items. The conclusions are likely to serve as the basis for defining a specific “linguistic realm” of the Internet forum users in both languages in question, as well as contribute to identifying some current trends in cross-cultural communication based on modern tools and social media.