Signalling Sites of Contention in Judicial Discourse. An Exploratory Corpus- Based Analysis of Selected Stance Nouns in US Supreme Court Opinions and Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal Judgments

Abstract

This paper adopts a comparative, corpus-based perspective to examine the language of judicial justification. Based on substantial corpus data, the study explores one of the linguistics resources, i.e. head nouns (e.g. assumption, belief, notion, etc.) followed by a nominal complement in the form of that-clause in two comparable legal settings: the opinions given in the United States Supreme Court and the judgements handed down by Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal. The findings corroborate the results of previous research which shows that nouns found in this pattern are used to perform various discourse functions but evaluation plays a central role in judicial writing and these nouns are used to signal sites of contentions. The study reveals the general similarity between the two sets of data suggesting that American and Polish judicial writing is underpinned by essentially the same epistemological assumptions. Yet, there are some differences in the way the nouns behave phraseologically. Polish nouns tend to show less collocational variation and they are found performing fewer discourse functions.

A comparative investigation of metadiscursive clarifying devices in the abortion discourse of the U.S. Supreme Court

“…Cheng and Cheng, 2014), and areas like stance (e.g. Goźdź-Roszkowski, 2017), the present study fills two principal gaps in the judicial discourse literature. Firstly, as already stated, just a few studies have examined separate opinions.…”

“…I collected data from two open domain sources: the Cornell Legal Information Institute (as in Goźdź-Roszkowski, 2020), and FindLaw.Com (as in Goźdź-Roszkowski, 2017). I collected 40 post-Roe and Doe SCOTUS opinions concerning abortion (217,685 words in total).…”

“…. [providing] the reason on which the basis of the decision is made’ (Goźdź-Roszkowski, 2017: 98). Semi-formulaic parts such as headnotes and the procedural history were excluded as, unlike the opinions, these are not legally binding.…”