3.2 Goźdź-Roszkowski & Pontrandolfo
Stanisław Goźdź-Roszkowski & Gianluca Pontrandolfo. (2013). Evaluative Patterns in Judicial Discourse: A Corpus-based Phraseological Perspective on American and Italian Criminal Judgments. International Journal of Law, Language & Discourse 3(2), 9-69.
Abstract: The present paper aims at exploring the pivotal role of evaluative phraseology in judges’ discourse, typified in the legal genre of the judgment. This contrastive cross-language study involves a bottom-up approach to evaluation based on the investigation of judgments dealing with criminal cases delivered by the courts of last resort in the United States and Italy: the Supreme Court of the United States and the Italian Corte Suprema di Cassazione. The bilingual comparable corpus for the analysis is made up by two sub-corpora, the American and the Italian ones, of approximately 1,000,000 tokens respectively. From a methodological point of view, Hunston’s semantic sequences (2008) – in particular the Noun + that-clause (‘N che’) – are used as probes to discover evaluation patterns in judicial reasoning and as a means to explore differences and similarities between US and Italian judicial reasoning. The preliminary findings provided in this contribution point to a striking similarity in the way both Italian and American judges carry out evaluative meanings.
Keywords: Evaluative language, phraseological patterns, legal language, corpus, criminal judgments
Category: Volume 3
