Skip to main content

Advertisement

SpringerLink
Log in

Fact Versus Opinion in US Defamation Law: A Corpus and Appraisal Analysis of Speaker Stance Toward Reputational Harm

  • Published:
International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Sitting at the nexus of unchanging constitutional rights, constantly evolving social norms, and tensions between federal and state justice systems, defamation law in the US is exceedingly complex. In this work, I focus on a single conceptual and practical problem amidst this network: the fact-opinion distinction. This distinction—developed largely as a result of US Supreme Court decisions Gertz v. Robert Welch, Inc. and Milkovich v. Lorraine Journal Co.—states that, while opinions are protected under the First Amendment so long as they do not imply “provably false” information, facts, if false, may always be actionable in a lawsuit for defamation. Thus, the judicial decision of whether an allegedly defamatory statement is fact or opinion is influential in determining whether a claim may move forward. In spite of the significance of this distinction, legal precedent and academic literature shows that there are no generally agreed upon characteristics to organize statements into these two categories. Using the framework of Appraisal Analysis (Martin and White, The Language of Evaluation: Appraisal in English, Palgrave Macmillan, London 2005), I examine a corpus of previously adjudicated defamatory language to answer the question: how does expression of stance differ between judicially-determined statements of opinion and fact in defamation cases? This analysis reveals that judicially-determined opinions express more markers of attitude and expanding engagement than their factual counterparts. Ultimately, I argue that this research may be directly applied to the analysis of allegedly defamatory language in the US, and, in being so applied, may play a role in adding robustness to existing analytical procedures regarding the distinction between fact and opinion in defamation law in the US.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Fig. 4
Fig. 5

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. These elements are discussed further in Sect. 2.1.

  2. If an opinion implies speaker knowledge of an associated defamatory fact, then the statement may not be protected from claims of defamation [23, Milkovich v Lorain Journal Co, 1990].

  3. Defamation per se is defined as a statement that is considered to be so harmful on its face that the plaintiff need not prove special damages. This type of statement could include claims that someone has a “loathsome” disease or has committed “a crime of moral turpitude”. In contrast, defamation per quod is less explicitly harmful, meaning that the plaintiff must prove that damages occurred as a result of the at-issue statement [15].

  4. For example, while jurisdictions like Illinois and New Jersey use fact-opinion tests that emphasize verifiability, jurisdictions like Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Washington rely more heavily on analysis of undisclosed defamatory facts to determine whether a statement can be considered fact or opinion. States such as Massachusetts and New York use totality-of-circumstances fact-opinion analysis to determine whether a statement is actionable.

  5. See Nieto [47] for a more in-depth discussion of related research.

  6. Krüger et al. [36] define semantic sentiment of words as the level and type of subjectivity they contain – high, low, or neutral and positive, neutral, or negative, respectively. These categories were sourced from the Subjectivity Lexicon, a corpus developed by Wilson et al. [68], that contains 15,991 expressions from 451 texts which have been coded and tagged according to subjectivity level and type. Sentiment, in this lexicon, is not limited to any particular part of speech.

  7. Gales [20] argues that all language should be considered inherently heteroglossic due to the interconnected, social nature of the communication form. In this study, I adhere to this belief and, thus, do not discuss hetero- or monoglossia further in my analyses. However, future research into fact as a function of heteroglossic language may be helpful in gaining further insight into the role of engagement in communication of fact as a more general linguistic concept.

  8. This characterization refers only to the news reporting genre in its prototypical sense. As news media outlets become more polarized and politicized, expectations of minimal personal stance markers in the genre may shift. [44, 48]. For the purposes of this research on stance in allegedly defamatory statements, acknowledgement of the empirically-supported relationship between fact-based language and infrequency of stance markers, rather than focus on news reporting as an evolving genre, is sufficient.

  9. It should be noted that there is disagreement in the field regarding the use of statistical tests like Chi-Squared tests on corpus data due to the test’s sensitivity to sample size [7]. While other statistical analyses were not feasible for this preliminary study, more complex review of the sub-corpora for significant differences is needed and welcomed as this line of inquiry progresses.

  10. Collocation analysis was used to identify the frequency at which subjective lexical items – largely consisting of subjective adjectives – occurred shortly before and after nouns and the verb to be in any form. Here, shortly is operationalized as a span of ± 3 words. Once collocates were identified, manual review of the subjective lexical items and the statements in which they occurred was executed to determine whether the associated syntax indicated new or known information as described by Kaiser and Wang [29] and reiterated in the main text above.

  11. Homophones of modals, including the contractual meaning of will and the month of May were manually removed from the data set.

  12. Volition/Permission Modals included will, would, shall, and be going to. Permission/ability modals included can, could, may, and, might. Finally, obligation/necessity modals included must, should, (had) better, have to, have got to, got to, need to, be supposed to, and ought to.

  13. It is believed, and supported by prior literature, that the non-significance of certain features previously associated with distinguishing fact from opinion may arise from the fact that the genre being analyzed in this research differs from that prior work [36]. Frequency of elements like communication verbs, quotation, and negation may be unique to a news and/or editorial context, rather than the less homogeneous environments from which allegedly defamatory language emerges. This hypothesis requires further research to confirm.

  14. A syntactic pattern associated with new information occurred 11 times and in 7 texts across the Fact sub-corpus. This syntactic pattern was more widespread across the Opinion sub-corpus, occurring 48 times across 34 texts.

  15. Future, more in-depth, research into the interaction between these syntactic structures and the presence of subjective lexical items may be beneficial to gaining a clearer understanding of the way these features manifest in judicially-determined fact and opinion.

  16. This absence of shall and be going to and the abundance of would over will may be a reflection of the register of texts included in the corpus. Additional research is required to gain insight into the cause of these observed patterns.

References

  1. Alhindi, T., Muresan, S., & Preoţiuc-Pietro, D. 2020. Fact vs. Opinion: The Role of Argumentation Features in News Classification. In Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (pp. 6139–6149).

  2. Angelotti, E.M. 2013. Twibel Law: What Defamation and Its Remedies Look like in the Age of Twitter. Journal of High Technology Law 13 (2): 430–507.

    Google Scholar 

  3. American Law Institute. 1965. Restatement of the Law, Second, Torts 2d. St. Paul, Minn.: American Law Institute Publishers.

    Google Scholar 

  4. Anthony, L. 2022. AntConc (Version 4.0.5) [Computer Software]. Tokyo, Japan: Waseda University. Available from https://www.laurenceanthony.net/software

  5. Austin, J.L. 1962. How to Do Things with Words. London: Clarendon Press.

    Google Scholar 

  6. Banerjee, R., N. Yuill, C. Larson, K. Easton, E. Robinson, and M. Rowley. 2007. Children’s Differentiation Between Beliefs About Matters of Fact and Matters of Opinion. Developmental Psychology 43 (5): 1084–1096. https://doi.org/10.1037/0012-1649.43.5.1084.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  7. Bestgen, Y. 2014. Inadequacy of the Chi-squared Test to Examine Vocabulary Differences Between Corpora. Literary and Linguistic computing 29 (2): 164–170.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  8. Bhaskar, P. 2019. Milkovich, #MeToo, and “Liars”: Defamation Law and the Fact-Opinion Distinction. Fordham Law Review 88 (2): 691–732.

    Google Scholar 

  9. Biber, D. 2006. University Language: A Corpus-Based Study of Spoken and Written Registers, vol. 23. John Benjamins Publishing.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  10. Biber, D., S. Conrad, and R. Reppen. 1998. Corpus Linguistics: Investigating Language Structure and Use. Cambridge University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  11. Biber, D., S. Johansson, G. Leech, S. Conrad, E. Finegan, and R. Quirk. 1999. Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English, vol. 2. London: Longman.

    Google Scholar 

  12. Blake, J.S. 2019. News in a Digital Age: Comparing the Presentation of News Information Over Time and Across Media Platforms. Rand Corporation.

    Google Scholar 

  13. Brown, P., and S.C. Levinson. 1978. Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  14. Conley, R. 2015. Confronting the Death Penalty: How Language Influences Jurors in Capital Cases. Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  15. Cornell University School of Law. Defamation. Legal Information Institute. https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/defamation. Accessed 5 May 2022.

  16. Dancygier, B. 2012. Viewpoint in Language: A Multimodal Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  17. Dreibelbis, H.M. 2021. Social Media Defamation: A New Legal Frontier amid the Internet Wild West. Duke J. Const. L. Pub. Pol’y 16: 245.

    Google Scholar 

  18. Durant, A. 1996. On the Interpretation of Allusions and Other Innuendo Meanings in Libel Actions: The Value of Semantic and Pragmatic Evidence. International Journal of Speech Language and the Law 3 (2): 195–210.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  19. Elving, E. 2020. The Online Defamation Dilemma: Adapting an Age-Old Doctrine to the Reality of Modern Speech. Marquette Law Review 104 (2): 543–574.

    Google Scholar 

  20. Gales, T. 2011. Identifying Interpersonal Stance in Threatening Discourse: An Appraisal Analysis. Discourse Studies 13 (1): 27–46.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  21. Gales, T. 2017. Threatening Stances: A Corpus Analysis of Realized vs. Non-Realized Threats. Language and Law/Linguagem e Direito, 2(2)

  22. Gales, T. 2020. ‘Prison Has been a Proper Punishment’: Investigating Stance in Forensic and Legal Contexts. In The Routledge Handbook of Forensic Linguistics (pp. 675–693). Routledge.

  23. Hansen, M.F. 1993. Fact, Opinion, and Consensus: The Verifiability of Allegedly Defamatory Speech. George Washington Law Review 62 (1): 43–99.

    Google Scholar 

  24. Harkess, J. 1998. Linguistic Inspection of the Law of Defamation. Auckland University Law Review 8 (3): 653–685.

    Google Scholar 

  25. Harris, A. 2010, May 20. It depends on what the meaning of the word 'idiot' is. Richmond BizSense. https://richmondbizsense.com/2010/05/20/it-depends-on-what-the-meaning-of-the-word-idiot-is/. Accessed 5 May 2022.

  26. Harwood, N. 2005. We Do Not Seem to have a Theory: The theory I Present here Attempts to Fill This Gap: Inclusive and Exclusive Pronouns in Academic Writing. Applied Linguistics 26 (3): 343–375. https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/ami012.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  27. Hunt, P.H. 2013. Tortious Tweets: A Practical Guide to Applying Traditional Defamation Law to Twibel Claims. Louisiana Law Review 73 (2): 8.

    Google Scholar 

  28. Hyland, K. 2001. Humble Servants of the Discipline? Self-mention in Research Articles. English for Specific Purposes 20: 207–226. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0889-4906(00)00012-0.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  29. Kaiser, E., and C. Wang. 2021. Packaging Information as Fact Versus Opinion: Consequences of the (information-) Structural Position of Subjective Adjectives. Discourse Processes 58 (7): 617–641.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  30. Kapellidi, C. 2007. The Speaking Subject in Communication:‘Subjectivity and the (Gendered) Self. CAMLING 2007: 112.

    Google Scholar 

  31. Kauffeld, F.J. 1998. Presumptions and the Distribution of Argumentative Burdens in Acts of Proposing and Accusing. Argumentation 12 (2): 245–266.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  32. Kirchmeier, J.L. 1988. The Illusion of the Fact-Opinion Distinction in Defamation Law. Case W. Res. L. Rev. 39: 867.

    Google Scholar 

  33. Kockelman, P. 2004. Stance and Subjectivity. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 14 (2): 127–150.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  34. Koebler, J. 2014, April 17. The lawsuit over calling someone 'Fucking crazy' on Twitter is Fucking crazy. VICE. https://www.vice.com/en/article/wnjn8m/the-lawsuit-over-calling-someone-fucking-crazy-on-twitter-is-fucking-crazy. Accessed 5 May 2022.

  35. Kredens, K. 2015. Scarlet Letter or Badge of Honour? Semantic Interpretation in Changing Contexts of Culture. Speaking of Language and Law: Conversations on the Work of Peter Tiersma, 175.

  36. Krüger, K.R., A. Lukowiak, J. Sonntag, S. Warzecha, and M. Stede. 2017. Classifying News Versus Opinions in Newspapers: Linguistic Features for Domain Independence. Natural Language Engineering 23 (5): 687–707.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  37. Latner, A. W. 2021, November 15. Does calling a colleague physician an "idiot" constitute defamation? MPR. https://www.empr.com/home/features/does-calling-a-colleague-physician-an-idiot-constitute-defamation/2/. Accessed 5 May 2022.

  38. Leslie, C., and M. Kasindorf. 1986. Fact-Opinion Distinction in Defamation: Janklow v. Newsweek Confusion Persists in the Distinction between Fact and Opinion in Defamation Actions. UMKC Law Review 54 (4): 704–721.

    Google Scholar 

  39. Li, J., Dijkstra, K., & Zwaan, R. A. 2022. The Use of Direct and Indirect Speech Across Psychological Distance. Memory & Cognition, 1–10.

  40. Lidsky, L., and R. Jones. 2016. Of Reasonable Readers and Unreasonable Speakers: Libel Law in Networked World. Virginia Journal of Social Policy & the Law 23 (2): 155–178.

    Google Scholar 

  41. Magaldi, J., & Davis, W. 2019. 'Into the Bowels of Hell': Examining Online Defamation Law Through the Twitter Account of James Woods. Southern Law, 29(2).

  42. Martin, J.R., and D. Rose. 2003. Working with Discourse: Meaning Beyond the Clause. New York, NY: Continuum.

    Google Scholar 

  43. Martin, J.R., and P.R.R. White. 2005. The Evaluation of Language: Appraisal in English. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  44. Morstatter, F., L. Wu, U. Yavanoglu, S.R. Corman, and H. Liu. 2018. Identifying Framing Bias in Online news. ACM Transactions on Social Computing 1 (2): 1–18.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  45. Moskowich, I. 2017. Pronouns as stance markers in the Coruña Corpus: An analysis of the CETA, CEPhiT and CHET. In Alonso Almeida, F. (Ed.), Stancetaking in Late Modern English Scientific Writing. Evidence from the Coruña Corpus. Essays in Honour of Santiago González y Fernández-Corugedo, (pp. 73–91). Valencia: Universitat Politécnica de Valencia.

  46. Myers, G. 1992. In this Paper we Report...: Speech acts and Scientific Facts. Journal of Pragmatics 17: 295–313. https://doi.org/10.1016/0378-2166(92)90013-2.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  47. Nieto, V.G. 2020. Defamation as a Language Crime-A Sociopragmatic Approach to Defamation Cases in the High Courts of Justice of Spain. JLL 9: 1.

    Google Scholar 

  48. Nikolov, D., M. Lalmas, A. Flammini, and F. Menczer. 2019. Quantifying Biases in Online Information Exposure. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology 70 (3): 218–229.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  49. Nott, L. A quick guide to libel law. Freedom Forum Institute. https://www.freedomforuminstitute.org/first-amendment-center/primers/libellaw/ Accessed 27 April 2022.

  50. Ott, R.W. 1990. Fact and Opinion in Defamation: Recognizing the Formative Power of Context. Fordham L. Rev. 58: 761.

    Google Scholar 

  51. Post, R.C. 1986. The Social Foundations of Defamation Law: Reputation and the Constitution. California Law Review 74 (3): 691–742.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  52. Rabinowitz, M., M. Acevedo, S. Casen, M. Rosengarten, M. Kowalczyk, and L.B. Portnoy. 2013. Distinguishing Facts from Beliefs: Fuzzy Categories. Psychology of Language and Communication 17 (3): 241.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  53. Rayson, P., and R. Garside. 1998. The Claws Web Tagger. ICAME Journal 22: 121–123.

    Google Scholar 

  54. Robert, S.P. 1991. Post-Milkovich Defamation: Is Everyone Still Entitled to Their Opinion. John’s L. Rev. 65: 1105.

    Google Scholar 

  55. Sanders, M. 1987. The Fact/Opinion Distinction: An Analysis of the Subjectivity of Language and Law. Marquette Law Review 70 (4): 673–691.

    Google Scholar 

  56. Searle, J. 1969. Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge: University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  57. Shen, Q., and Y. Tao. 2021. Stance Markers in English Medical Research Articles And Newspaper Opinion Columns: A Comparative Corpus-Based Study. PLoS ONE 16 (3): e0247981.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  58. Shuy, R.W. 2010. The Language of Defamation Cases. Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  59. Sowle, K.D. 1994. A Matter of Opinion: Milkovich Four Years Later. Wm. & Mary Bill Rts. J. 3: 467.

    Google Scholar 

  60. Stenvall, Maria. 2014. Presenting and Representing Emotions in News Agency Reports. Critical Discourse Studies 11 (4): 461–481. https://doi.org/10.1080/17405904.2013.866588.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  61. Stern, N. 2010. The Intrinsic Character of Defamatory Content as Grounds for Uniform Regime of Proving Libel. Mississippi Law Journal 80 (1): 1–68.

    Google Scholar 

  62. Tausczik, Y.R., and J.W. Pennebaker. 2010. The Psychological Meaning of Words: LIWC And computerized Text Analysis Methods. Journal of language and social psychology 29 (1): 24–54.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  63. Thomas, J.E. 1999. Pragmatic Approach to Meaning in Defamation Law. Wake Forest Law Review 34 (2): 333–408.

    Google Scholar 

  64. Tiersma, P.M. 1987. Language of Defamation. Tex. L. Rev. 66: 303.

    Google Scholar 

  65. Vandelanotte, L. 2004. From Representational to Scopal ‘Distancing Indirect Speech or Thought’: A Cline of Subjectification. Text & Talk 24 (4): 547–585.

    Google Scholar 

  66. Walker, M. & Matsa, K. E. 2021. “News Consumption across Social Media in 2021.” Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/2021/09/20/news-consumption-across-social-media-in-2021/.

  67. Wiebe, J., T. Wilson, R. Bruce, M. Bell, and M. Martin. 2004. Learning Subjective Language. Computational Linguistics 30 (3): 277–308.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  68. Wilson, T., Hoffmann, P., Somasundaran, S., Kessler, J., Wiebe, J., Choi, Y., ... & Patwardhan, S. 2005, October. OpinionFinder: A system for subjectivity analysis. In Proceedings of HLT/EMNLP 2005 Interactive Demonstrations (pp. 34–35).

  69. Woods v. John Doe. Declarations and Report of Professor Edward Finegan, Ph.D. No. BC-589746 (Cal. Superior Court.) https://thebloomfirm.com/wp content/uploads/2020/01/2016.01.20-Wood-Opposition-to-John-Does-Special-Motion-to-Strike.pdf. Accessed 2 February 2016.

  70. Zohar, I. 2015. Linguistic-Rhetorical Investigation of Concession Structures in a Confrontational Academic Context. REDIS Revista de Estudos do Discurso 4: 66–94.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Hofstra University, Hempstead, NY, USA

    Amanda Izes

Authors
  1. Amanda Izes
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Amanda Izes.

Ethics declarations

Conflict of interest

The author has no competing interests to declare that are relevant to the content of this article.

Additional information

Publisher's Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Supplementary Information

Below is the link to the electronic supplementary material.

Supplementary file1 (DOCX 19 KB)

Rights and permissions

Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Izes, A. Fact Versus Opinion in US Defamation Law: A Corpus and Appraisal Analysis of Speaker Stance Toward Reputational Harm. Int J Semiot Law 36, 1185–1216 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-023-09981-2

Download citation

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-023-09981-2

Keywords

Search

Navigation