La negazione multipla nei testi giuridici: veramente non si può negare che sia un tratto caratteristico?

This paper investigates what are known as “double” or "multiple negatives” in legal texts drafted in three European languages: Castilian Spanish, British English and the varieties of Italian used in both Italian and Swiss Courts. For the purpose of our study, corpora of Court judgments and control corpora comprising newspaper articles were compiled for all three of the languages under scrutiny. The data obtained from the survey show that the English and Spanish texts make a more frequent use of negatives in general and of multiple negatives in particular in court judgments than in newspaper articles. In contrast, the Italian corpus seems to behave differently: negative items are more numerous in newspapers than in Italian and Swiss court judgments, even though the frequency of “non” before nouns, adjectives, adverbs and negative prefixes is greater in the legal texts. However, it should be stressed that, regardless of the language, constructs involving more items classified as negatives from a strictly morphological viewpoint never add up to a significant share of the subcorpora. Furthermore, our study stresses the difficulties emerging in the very definition of “multiple negatives”, with the ensuing problems in the identification of semantically equivalent affirmative constructs. Finally, it should be noted that this research has only considered double and multiple negatives that are made explicit through the use of morphological markers, while the combination of those markers with lexical items having a negative meaning has been overlooked.