Reporting Verbs in Court Judgments of the Common Law System: A Corpus-Based Study

A corpus-based interpretation of the discourse–cognitive–society triangle on Chinese court judgments

“…Intertextuality permeates the judicial discourse in many different aspects, and all judgment precedents are a matter of intertextuality. Court judgments are the written forms of interaction among previous judges, litigants, lawyers, and expert witnesses, which embodies heavy intertextuality (Yu, 2021). In this sense, a court judgment involves the consultation among different levels of texts, and it should use the different texts effectively and simultaneously, taking into account the political and ideological functions and social customs (Bell and Pether, 1998).…”

“…From a semiotic perspective, Wu and Cheng (2020) construct a model of evidentiality in Chinese court judgments. Yu (2021) argues that the reporting verbs reflect how judges identify the evidence of different documents in Chinese court judgments. Alghazzawi et al (2022) use an LSTM + CNN neural network model with an optimal feature set to predict court judgments efficiently.…”

Corpus Linguistics in Legal Discourse

“…These are often compiled by researchers for the purpose of a specific research task. For example, Wei Yu [109] compares patterns of distribution and use of reporting verbs in self-compiled corpus of UK Supreme Court court judgments (of 1.17 million) with the BNC sampler corpus as a reference corpus (1.01 million) using an existing programme Wmatrix [88]. In this study, reporting verbs are treated as 'entry points' providing insights into the construction of argumentation in judicial opinions.…”