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.
Titolo: | Evaluative Patterns in Judicial Discourse: A Corpus-based Phraseological Perspective on American and Italian Criminal Judgments |
Autori: | |
Data di pubblicazione: | 2013 |
Stato di pubblicazione: | Pubblicato |
Rivista: | |
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. |
Handle: | http://hdl.handle.net/11368/2772121 |
URL: | http://www.ijlld.com/images/pdf/IJLLD%20Volume%203.2.pdf https://www.ijlld.com/34/2013-journals/volume-3-issue-2-2013/ |
Appare nelle tipologie: | 1.1 Articolo in Rivista |
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