Sensibly and appropriately the judge considered… A corpus-based study of sentence adverbs in judicial language

Abstract

The paper presents a contrastive corpus-assisted discourse study of sentence adverbs in Italian, English and Spanish judicial discourse.

The hypothesis guiding the study is that, although judges’ attitude is supposed to be impartial, as they represent the so-called “bouche de la loi”, their opinion is present in the texts and sentence adverbs are one of the pragmatic vehicles used to express their stance.

The corpus used for the analysis is a trilingual subcorpus of COSPE (Pontrandolfo 2016) that has been POS-tagged (194,000 tokens for each language). The focus has then been placed exclusively on adverbs ending in -mente and -ly for being those that more than others contribute to express evaluative nuances in judicial discourse.

Results demonstrate that quantitatively adverbs in -mente/-ly do not account for a significant percentage, which is in line with Biber et al.’s (1999) findings in other registers (conversation, academic prose). However, qualitatively and discursively, these adverbs play a pivotal role at a pragmatic level, since they contribute to judicial argumentation (cf., among others, Mazzi 2014).