Exploring the Local Grammar of Evaluation: The Case of Adjectival Patterns in American and Italian Judicial Discourse

Authors

  • Gianluca Pontrandolfo University of Trieste, Italy
  • Stanisław Goźdź-Roszkowski University of Łódź, Poland

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.2478/rela-2014-0014

Keywords:

evaluation, judicial discourse, legal language, local grammar, pattern, phraseology

Abstract

Based on a 2-million word bilingual comparable corpus of American and Italian judgments, this paper tests the applicability of a local grammar to study evaluative phraseology in judicial discourse in English and Italian. In particular, the study compares the use of two patterns: v-link + ADJ + that pattern / copula + ADJ + che and v-link + ADJ + to-infinitive pattern / copula + ADJ + verbo all’infinito in the disciplinary genre of criminal judgments delivered by the US Supreme Court and the Italian Corte Suprema di Cassazione. It is argued that these two patterns represent a viable and efficient diagnostic tool for retrieving instances of evaluative language and they represent an ideal starting point and a relevant unit of analysis for a cross-language analysis of evaluation in domainrestricted specialised discourse. Further, the findings provided shed light on important interactions occurring among major interactants involved in the judicial discourse.

References

Barnbrook, Geoff. 2002. Defining Language: A Local Grammar of Definition Sentences. John Benjamins Publishing Company
Google Scholar

Bednarek, Monika (2007) Local Grammar and Register Variation: Explorations in Broadsheet and Tabloid Newspaper Discourse. ELR Journal, 1 (1)
Google Scholar

Biber, Douglas (2006). University Language. A corpus-based study of spoken and written language. John Benjamins Publishing Company
Google Scholar

Chafe, Wallace and Nichols, Johanna (eds.). (1986). Evidentiality: The Linguistic Encoding of Epistemology. Norwood, NJ: Ablex
Google Scholar

Francis, Gill, Hunston, Susan. & Manning, Elizabeth. (1996). Collins Cobuild Grammar Patterns 1: Verbs. London: HarperCollins
Google Scholar

Francis, Gill, Hunston, Susan. & Manning, Elizabeth. (1998). Collins Cobuild Grammar Patterns 2: Nouns and Adjectives. London: HarperCollins
Google Scholar

Goźdź-Roszkowski, Stanisław (2007) Pattern and Meaning in Judicial Argumentation. An Exploratory Study. In: Corpora and ICT in Language Studies. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 155-166
Google Scholar

Goźdź-Roszkowski, Stanisław & Pontrandolfo, Gianluca. (2013). Evaluative patterns in judicial discourse: a corpus-based phraseological perspective on American and Italian criminal judgments. In: Cheng, L. (ed.) International Journal of Law, Language and Discourse: IJLLD 3.2. http://www.ijlld.com/index.php/journal-index/2013-index/112-volume-3-issue-2-2013
Google Scholar

Gross, Maurice (1993). Local Grammars and their Representation by Finite Automata. In (Ed) Hoey, M. Data, Description, Discourse: Papers on the English Language in Honour of John McH Sinclair. HarperCollins Publishers. pp 26-38
Google Scholar

Harris, Zellig Sabbettai (1991). A Theory of Language and Information: A Mathematical Approach. Oxford: Clarendon Press
Google Scholar

Heffer, Chris (2007). Judgement in Court: Evaluating participants in courtroom discourse. In Kredens, K. and Goźdź-Roszkowski, S. (eds.) Language and the Law: International Outlooks. Lodz Studies in Language series, vol. 16. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 145-179
Google Scholar

Hunston, Susan. 1994. Evaluation and organisation in academic discourse. In Coulthard, M. (ed.) Advances in Written Text Analysis. London: Routledge. 191-218
Google Scholar

Hunston, Susan. 2004.Counting the uncountable. Problems of identifying evaluation in a text and in a corpus. In Corpora and Discourse, A. Partington, J. Morley & L
Google Scholar

Haarman (eds.), 157-188, Bern: Peter Lang Hunston, Susan. 2011. Corpus Approaches to Evaluation. Phraseology and Evaluative Language. New York/London: Routledge
Google Scholar

Hunston, Susan & and Francis, Gill. (2000) Pattern Grammar: A Corpus-Driven Approach to the Lexical Grammar of English. Amsterdam: John Benjamins
Google Scholar

Hunston, Susan & Sinclair John. 2000. A Local Grammar of Evaluation. In: S. Hunston and G. Thompson (eds.) Evaluation in Text. Authorial Stance and the Construction of Discourse, Oxford University Press, 74-101 Hyland, Ken and Tse, Polly. 2004. Metadiscourse in academic writing: A reappraisal, In Applied Linguistics 25: 156-176
Google Scholar

Lehrberger John.1986. Sublanguage analysis, In: R. Grishman, R. Kittredge (eds.) Analyzing Language in Restricted Domains, Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers, 19-38
Google Scholar

Martin, James R. and White, Peter R. 2005. The Language of Evaluation: Appraisal in English. London: Palgrave
Google Scholar

Mazzi, Davide. 2007. The Construction of Argumentation in Judicial Texts: Combining a Genre and Corpus Perspective. In Argumentation, 1/2007, 21-38
Google Scholar

Mazzi, Davide. 2010. This Argument Fails for Two Reasons… A Linguistic Analysis of Judicial Evaluation Strategies in US Supreme Court Judgements. In International Journal for the Semiotics of Law Vol. 23 No. 4, 373-385
Google Scholar

Montesquieu, Charles Louis de Secondat (1748) [1956]. De l'esprit des lois. Paris: Garnier
Google Scholar

Montesquieu, Charles Louis de Secondat (2001). The spirits of Law. Translated by Thomas Nugent. Kitchener: Batoche Books
Google Scholar

Ochs, Elinor. (ed.). (1989). The Pragmatic of Affect. Special Issue of Text, Vol. 9
Google Scholar

Palmer, Frank R. (1987). The English Verb 2nd Edition. London: Longman
Google Scholar

Partington, Alan, Alison Duguid and Chrarlotte Taylor (2013). Patterns and Meanings in Discourse. Theory and practice in corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS). John Benjamins Publishing Company
Google Scholar

Pearson, Jennifer (1998) Terms in Context, John Benjamins Publishing Company
Google Scholar

Pontrandolfo, Gianluca (2013). La fraseología en las sentencias penales: un estudio contrastivo español, italiano, inglés basado en corpus. Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Trieste. http://www.openstarts.units.it/dspace/handle/10077/8590?mode=full
Google Scholar

Sinclair, John. (1988). Mirror for a text. Journal of English and Foreign Languages 1: 15-44
Google Scholar

Taboada, Maite and Grieve, Jack. (2004). Analyzing appraisal automatically. In Proceedings of AAAI Spring Symposium on Exploring Attitude and Affect in Text. Stanford. March 2004. 158-161
Google Scholar

Thompson, G. and Hunston, S. (2000). Evaluation: an introduction. In S. Hunston and G
Google Scholar

Thompson (eds.) Evaluation in Text: Authorial Stance and the Construction of Discourse. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1-27
Google Scholar

Downloads

Published

2014-03-30

How to Cite

Pontrandolfo, G., & Goźdź-Roszkowski, S. (2014). Exploring the Local Grammar of Evaluation: The Case of Adjectival Patterns in American and Italian Judicial Discourse. Research in Language, 12(1), 71–91. https://doi.org/10.2478/rela-2014-0014

Issue

Section

Articles