“If it be the case that the appellants are under such an obligation…”: A comparative study of conditionals in English legal discourse

Legal communication is an area where English has increasingly been employed by both native and non-native speakers. In an attempt to carry out a comparative study, the aim of this paper is to focus on language variation in the genre of judgments. For this purpose, a key feature of judicial texts, namely conditionality, was studied. On the basis of a collection of recent EU and Irish judgments, a large sample of conditional subordinators was analysed. Data showed that conditional clauses mainly express what Quirk et al. (1985) call direct open conditions. More specifically, there is evidence that conditionals occur in four outstanding contexts: the expression of obligations; the formulation of conditions under which permissions are granted; the laying down of prohibitions; and the expression of the judge’s recommendations. Finally, an important role is also played by the second category of direct condition identified by Quirk at al. (1985), i.e. hypothetical conditions. Taken together, data appear to suggest that language-relevant findings are indicative of interesting differences also to be read in terms of underlying legal culture

\u201cThe diet is not suitable for all...\u201d: On the British and Irish web-based discourse on the Ketogenic Diet

This paper is aimed at analysing the discourse tools and argumentative resources at work in the debate on the Ketogenic Diet (KD), an increasingly popular regimen with far-reaching clinical implications. The study centred on two small comparable corpora including web-based materials from relevant stakeholders in the debate on the KD, namely health institutions, charities and the press from the UK and Ireland. From a methodological point of view, the study consisted of two main stages: first of all, a quantitative analysis of phraseology focusing on lexical bundles; secondly, a qualitative study of patterns of argumentative discourse, for the purpose of identifying common argument schemes and their relationship in the overall argument structure. On the one hand, the British discourse on the KD broadly reflects the deeply-held conviction that the diet should be given proper consideration, especially in the treatment of drug-resistant epilepsy. On the other hand, the Irish discourse on the diet appears to be more complex and multi-layered. The role of the KD as a significant component of epilepsy treatment is acknowledged, but at the same time citations from influential figures often fulfil different argumentative commitments

\u201cBy partially renouncing their sovereignty...\u201d: on the discourse function(s) of lexical bundles in EU-related Irish judicial discourse

It is well known that the creation of such ever-expanding supra-national bodies as the European Union has brought not only speakers but also different and at times heterogeneous legal systems closer together (Maley 1994; Barcel\uf3 1997). EU Membership therefore had a strong impact on common-law countries like the Republic of Ireland: from a legal point of view, these yielded to Community law, i.e. a legal system largely influenced by the civil-law tradition, and they had to create a new legal infrastructure to accommodate the influx of vast amounts of EU legislation in economic and social matters (Dimitrakopoulos 2001; Tomkin 2004; Byrne, McCutcheon et al. 2014). In this context, this paper offers a corpus-based perspective to the study of the judicial discourse of the Supreme Court of the Republic of Ireland within EU-related judgments. On the basis of a corpus of authentic judgments delivered by the Court between 2001 and 2014 (742,194 words), the study is aimed at implementing and combining computer-assisted quantitative methods with manual qualitative text analysis, in the attempt to discern recurrent phraseological patterns in the Court\u2019s discourse. Drawing on the studies by Biber, Conrad and Cortes (2004), Pecorari (2009) and Breeze (2013) on lexical bundles, the investigation therefore focuses on key instances of phraseology in context. Results interestingly show that terms such as jurisdiction, (national) interest, sovereignty and Constitution (mainly collocating with compatible with) may be observed to be particularly prominent in the frequency lists generated for the corpus. By means of a concordance-based study (Sinclair 2003; Morley and Partington 2009), these terms and the related clusters can be taken into account to answer the question of how the Court\u2019s argumentative discourse deals with the fuzzy notion of national jurisdiction and/or interest in the context of an enlarged EU, where national and EU legislation may well overlap or compete with each other on a variety of legal subjects

"It must be obvious that this line of argument is utterly inconsistent…": on attitudinal qualification in English judicial discourse across legal systems

La questione delle strategie con cui parlanti e scriventi si pongono di fronte agli eventi comunicativi cui prendono parte, suscita l'attenzione dei linguisti da oltre un decennio. In quest'ottica, Biber et al. (1999) impiegano il termine 'stance' per designare l'espressione di giudizi e valutazioni, indagandone l'uso a cavallo di diversi registri (conversazione, prosa accademica e giornalistica). Inoltre, Conrad & Biber (2000) si soffermano sui diversi modi in cui parlanti e scriventi utilizzano gli avverbiali per contraddistinguere i diversi tipi di 'stance': tra questi, la 'stance' epistemica, intesa come formulazione della posizione di chi parla/scrive rispetto a certezza, veridicità o limitazioni di una proposizione, è stata analizzata con particolare riferimento al discorso accademico (Hyland 1998 e 2005a). In questo contesto, la 'stance' epistemica è stata frequentemente correlata all'uso di strumenti quali 'hedges' e 'boosters', rispettivamente impiegati per esprimere con maggiore o minore assertività le proposizioni del parlante/scrivente. Questo saggio attinge a queste ricerche e ha come obiettivo di intraprendere uno studio comparativo di 'hedges' e 'boosters' in un'altra area del discorso specialistico, il discorso legale esemplificato dal genere delle sentenze. Lo studio è basato su due corpora comparabili e sincronici: il primo include sentenze emesse dalla Corte Suprema della Repubblica d'Irlanda, mentre il secondo comprende testi analoghi della Corte di Giustizia dell'Unione Europea. In quanto tale, la ricerca muove a partire da dati provenienti da due sistemi giuridici che differiscono quanto all'uso della lingua inglese (lingua ufficiale v. lingua franca). Il saggio presenta così i risultati di un'analisi qualitativa e quantitativa di 'hedges' e 'boosters' rilevati attraverso gli strumenti della linguistica dei corpora (Ädel & Reppen 2008; Scott 2009). I risultati mettono in luce i contesti in cui i giudici irlandesi e comunitari tendono ad intensificare il proprio discorso in modo caratteristico: ad esempio, si è potuto osservare che i giudici irlandesi impiegano l'avverbio clearly con l'intento di enfatizzare l'interpretazione delle norme da essi prediletta. E' così interessante notare che i dati stabiliscono un collegamento tra l'uso degli elementi presi in esame in contesto, da un lato, e le diverse ed eterogenee culture giuridiche in cui l'intensificazione è utilizzata, dall'altro

“In Other Words, …”: A Corpus-based Study of Reformulation in Judicial Discourse

The language of the law has been a favourite subject of investigation for both legal professionals and linguists for more than a decade now. Linguists, for instance, have paid increasing attention to the interplay of precise and flexible terms in legal drafting, and language variation across the genres of legal discourse. Among the latter, judgments have been discussed as a case in point by argumentation scholars, although the linguistic components of judicial argumentative discourse have often been overlooked. In the light of this, the aim of this paper is to carry out a corpus-based analysis of the open-ended category of reformulation markers as outstanding discursive items of judicial discourse in two comparable corpora of authentic judgments issued by two different courts of last resort, namely the Court of Justice of the European Communities and Ireland’s Supreme Court. By combining a qualitative with a quantitative analysis, the study shows that reformulation markers tend to activate a variety of discursive configurations across the two courts. Hence, data reveal that reformulation strengthens the quality of both judicial narrative, as it were – as is clear from its deployment in clarifying the normative background and specifying the factual framework of disputes – and at once judicial argument, when judges characterise, refine or grade reported arguments/interpretations or they wish to make their reasoning more solid and convincing

Semantic Sequences and the Pragmatics of Medical Research Article Writing

In today’s medical profession, there is increasing recognition that doctors should develop clinical as well as research-oriented skills. In this respect, the medical discourse community demands that they become ever more active members of the discipline in both doing and writing about the research they undertake. This may request that doctors acquire sound knowledge of the relationship between the discourse structures of the discipline and its underlying epistemology. It is within such an educational setting that specialised corpora deserve to be acknowledged as a source of significant insights to socialise medical students along with practitioners into the distinctive communicative practices of scientific communities. The aim of this study is to focus on semantic sequences, defined by Hunston (2008: 271) as “recurring sequences of words or phrases […] more usefully characterized as sequences of meaning elements rather than as formal sequences”. Sequences are analysed here as a clue to the main aspects related to the presentation and discussion of research findings in specialised journals. In particular, they were studied on the basis of a corpus of authentic research articles, the genre with the lion’s share in specialised medico-scientific knowledge dissemination

“I Think Any Reasonable Person Will Agree…”: A Corpus and Text Study of Keywords in Irish Political Argumentation

This paper brings a corpus and discourse perspective to bear on the investigation of the broader argumentative implications of keywords in the context of 20th-century Irish politics. On the basis of two corpora including Michael Collins’ papers and Eamon de Valera’s speeches and statements, a keyword-in-context analysis was performed. Results provide evidence of the persuasive power of keywords as signposts leading to a better understanding of culturally shared rules of inference in political discourse

Phraseology, argumentation and identity in Supreme Court of Ireland’s judgments on language policy

The Irish judiciary’s approach to bilingualism as the constitutional guarantee of the right to use either Irish or English for any official purpose has proved highly flexible. However, while emphasis has been laid on principles of constitutional interpretation from the practitioner’s perspective, the discursive dimension of cases involving language policy has yet to be fully elucidated. This paper combines quantitative analysis with a qualitative perspective to focus on phraseological and argumentative patterns in Supreme Court judgments on language policy, based on a small corpus. First, the 10 most frequent lexical bundles of the corpus were extracted to study the main discourse functions of phraseology in context. Second, a manual text analysis was conducted of the two cases where recurrent phraseological patterns were most widely attested. This allowed for the isolation of the argument schemes underlying the structure of the Justices’ opinions. While phraseology points to a shared institutional identity of Irish Justices as gatekeepers of the Constitution, the use of argumentative patterns suggests that they may forge heterogeneous professional identities, by shifting from a rigoristic view of language rights to forms of judicial pragmatism

\u201cIt can be assumed that, if our conceptual model is valid, then\u2026\u201d: The Construction of Multiple Identities in Economics vs. Marketing

The paper compares the disciplines of marketing and economics, by using keywords as indicators of identity at three main levels: professional, academic and disciplinary. The corpus-based analysis of keywords how scholars from the two disciplines craft their niche of expertise and identity, showing, for instance, the empirical drive of marketing as opposed to the hypothetical nature of economic

Mapping the routes of perception: Hemispheric asymmetries in signal propagation dynamics

The visual system has long been considered equivalent across hemispheres. However, an increasing amount of data shows that functional differences may exist in this regard. We therefore tried to characterize the emergence of visual perception and the spatiotemporal dynamics resulting from the stimulation of visual cortices in order to detect possible interhemispheric asymmetries. Eighteen participants were tested. Each of them received 360 transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) pulses at phosphene threshold intensity over left and right early visual areas while electroencephalography was being recorded. After each single pulse, participants had to report the presence or absence of a phosphene. Local mean field power analysis of TMS-evoked potentials showed an effect of both site (left vs. right TMS) of stimulation and hemisphere (ipsilateral vs. contralateral to the TMS): while right TMS determined early stronger activations, left TMS determined later stronger activity in contralateral electrodes. The interhemispheric signal propagation index revealed differences in how TMS-evoked activity spreads: left TMS-induced activity diffused contralaterally more than right stimulation. With regard to phosphenes perception, distinct electrophysiological patterns were found to reflect similar perceptual experiences: left TMS-evoked phosphenes are associated with early occipito-parietal and frontal activity followed by late central activity; right TMS-evoked phosphenes determine only late, fronto-central, and parietal activations. Our results show that left and right occipital TMS elicits differential electrophysiological patterns in the brain, both per se and as a function of phosphene perception. These distinct activation patterns may suggest a different role of the two hemispheres in processing visual information and giving rise to perception