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“This Argument Fails for Two Reasons…”: A Linguistic Analysis of Judicial Evaluation Strategies in US Supreme Court Judgments

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Abstract

The centrality of argumentation in the judicial process is an age-old acquisition of research on legal discourse. Notwithstanding the deep insights provided by legal theoretical and philosophical works, only recently has judicial argumentation been tackled in its linguistic dimension. This paper aims to contribute to the development of linguistic studies of judicial argumentation, by shedding light on evaluation as a prominent aspect in the construction of the judge’s argumentative position. Evaluation as a deep structure of judicial argumentation is studied from a discursive point of view entailing the analysis of a sample of authentic judicial language. Evaluative lexis is investigated within a single genre of judicial discourse, i.e. judgments, instantiated by a corpus of US Supreme Court judgments. Findings show that judges use diversified strategies to take stance as they organise their argumentative discourse: from easily recognisable verbal and adjectival tools to more finely-grained discourse elements such as the encapsulating pattern ‘this/these/that/those + labelling noun’.

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Notes

  1. Only case Rita v. United States (21 June 2007) could not be included in the corpus, since the hypertextual link to it did not work.

  2. Concordance is one of the main on-screen functions provided by Wordsmith Tools 3.0. By typing in the desired word/phrase, the function provides the analyst with an all-inclusive list of corpus occurrences of the word/phrase in context.

  3. The use of italics as well as underscoring in examples signals my own focus of analysis. In particular, italicised items emphasise elements related to those of interest in the analytical discussion, whereas underlined items are those on which the study centres.

  4. In Table 1, the heading ‘Pattern occurrences’ refers to the frequency of the lemma as embedded in the pattern ‘this/these/that/those + labelling noun’ discussed in this section.

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  1. Department of Language and Translation Studies, University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Modena, Italy

    Davide Mazzi

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  1. Davide Mazzi
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Mazzi, D. “This Argument Fails for Two Reasons…”: A Linguistic Analysis of Judicial Evaluation Strategies in US Supreme Court Judgments. Int J Semiot Law 23, 373–385 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-010-9162-0

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