Verb Tense Distribution and Pragmatic Functions in Italian Court Judgments

A text-linguistic approach proves suitable for investigating legal language, the formal traits of which tend to vary greatly depending on text types. After an overview of the classifications of legal text types provided by both jurists and linguists, the principles of systemicfunctional linguistics and genre analysis are combined to analyse a corpus of Italian judgments and identify their genre according to their pragmatic function as macro-speech acts. Judgments fulfil an overall normative function, although they include descriptive, expositive, narrative and argumentative sections, as shown by the variation in the distribution of the dominant verb tenses within the text. However, the sequence order of text components is not determined by contextual factors and does not mirror the chronological steps leading to the drafting of judgments. Rather, it is the result of a historical development and the influence of models perceived as prestigious within the community of legal experts.