Facing the Facts: Evaluative Patterns in English and Italian Judicial Language

This chapter aims at exploring the pivotal role of evaluative phraseology in the language of a specific law professionals’ community, namely judges (Solan 1993; Philips 1998; Heffer 2007). Judges’ discourses, typified in the legal genre of judgments, represent a fertile ground for the study of evaluation, since they illustrate the reasoning that led them to make a particular decision. Adopting a corpus-based methodology, the study analyses the role of evaluative patterns in a specific judicial genre, namely criminal judgments. 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. From a methodological point of view, the starting point of the analysis is Hunston’s “N that” pattern (2008: 278-284), a lexico-grammar structure where a noun is followed by an appositive that-clause (e.g. the notion that, the suggestion that, the observation that, etc.). In particular, a case study is presented on the most common “N that” pattern in the corpus, namely fact that (fatto che). This pattern is used as a probe to discover evaluative phraseologies in judicial reasoning and as a means to explore differences and similarities between US and Italian judicial reasoning. The study has revealed strikingly similar phraseological behaviours in the way American and Italian judges formulate their opinions. In addition, a strong tendency towards latent or covert evaluative patterns has been identified

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

Legal Phraseology Today. A Corpus-based View

Phraseology is now taking centre stage in a wide range of fields. However, there are still relatively few empirical studies of word combinations in the domain of law and in the many different contexts where legal discourse is used. This recent explosion of interest has undoubtedly been sparked off by the development of corpus linguistics research and this special issue presents some of the latest developments in the study of this linguistic phenomenon from a corpus-based perspective. The aim of this special issue is to take stock of current research in corpus-based legal phraseology from a variety of perspectives: translational, comparative/contrastive, terminological and lexicographical. All the papers are multilingual, featuring different legal systems and legal languages. They provide in-depth corpus-informed analyses and case studies. The articles collected in this issue bring some further support to the broad conceptualisation of phraseology in LSP studies and highlight new ways in which phraseologisms can be investigated. This special issue can be of use not only for linguists interested in phraseology but also for lawyers and legal scholars, translators, lexicographers, terminologists as well as students who wish to pursue research in the area

Cross-linguistic approaches and applications to phraseology in legal and institutional discourse

This volume presents a comprehensive and up-to-date overview of major developments in the study of how phraseology is used in a wide range of different legal and institutional contexts. This recent interest has been mainly sparked by the development of corpus linguistics research, which has both demonstrated the centrality of phraseological patterns in language and provided researchers with new and powerful analytical tools. However, there have been relatively few empirical studies of word combinations in the domain of law and in the many different contexts where legal discourse is used. This book seeks to address this gap by presenting some of the latest developments in the study of this linguistic phenomenon from corpus-based and interdisciplinary perspectives. The volume draws on current research in legal phraseology from a variety of perspectives: translation, comparative/contrastive studies, terminology, lexicography, discourse analysis and forensic linguistics. It contains contributions from leading experts in the field, focusing on a wide range of issues amply illustrated through in-depth corpus-informed analyses and case studies. Most contributions to this book are multilingual, featuring different legal systems and legal languages