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.

Evaluative Patterns in Judicial Discourse: A Corpus-based Phraseological Perspective on American and Italian Criminal Judgments

PONTRANDOLFO, GIANLUCA
2013-01-01

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.
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/11368/2772121
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