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

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.