Phraseology, argumentation and identity in the Supreme Court of Ireland’s judgments on language policy
Issue: Vol 11 No. 3 (2014)
Journal: Journal of Applied Linguistics and Professional Practice
Subject Areas: Writing and Composition Linguistics
DOI: 10.1558/japl.32729
Abstract:
The Irish judiciary's approach to bilingualism as the constitutional guarantee of the right to use either Irish or English for any official purpose has proved highly flexible. However, while emphasis has been laid on principles of constitutional interpretation from the practitioner's perspective, the discursive dimension of cases involving language policy has yet to be fully elucidated. This paper combines quantitative analysis with a qualitative perspective to focus on phraseological and argumentative patterns in Supreme Court judgments on language policy, based on a small corpus. First, the ten most frequent lexical bundles of the corpus were extracted to study the main discourse functions of phraseology in context. Second, a manual text analysis was conducted of the two cases where recurrent phraseological patterns were most widely attested. This allowed for the isolation of the argument schemes underlying the structure of the Justices' opinions. While phraseology points to a shared institutional identity of Irish Justices as gatekeepers of the Constitution, the use of argumentative patterns suggests that they may forge heterogeneous professional identities, by shifting from a rigouristic view of language rights to forms of judicial pragmatism.
Author: Davide Mazzi
References :
Alexy, R. (1989) A Theory of Legal Argumentation: The Theory of Rational Discourse as Theory of Legal Justification. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Anthony, L. (2006) AntConc 3.2.1. Available at: http://www.laurenceanthony.net
Baker, P. and McEnery, T. (2015) Corpora and Discourse Studies: Integrating Discourse and Corpora. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137431738
Besselink, L. (2010) National and constitutional identity before and after Lisbon. Utrecht Law Review 6 (3): 36–49. https://doi.org/10.18352/ulr.139
Biber, D. (2006) University Language: A Corpus-Based Study of Spoken and Written Registers. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.23
Biber, D., Johansson, S., Leech, G., Conrad, S. and Finegan, E. (1999) Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. London: Longman.
Breeze, R. (2013) Lexical bundles across four legal genres. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 18 (2): 229–253. https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.18.2.03bre
Byrne, R., McCutcheon, P., Bruton, C. and Coffey, G. (2014) The Irish Legal System. Dublin: Bloomsbury.
Carbonell, F. (2013) Reasoning by consequences: Applying different argumentation structures to the analysis of consequentialist reasoning in judicial decisions. In C. Dahlman and E. T. Feteris (eds) Legal Argumentation Theory: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives, 1–20. Dordrecht: Springer.
Charles, M., Pecorari D. and Hunston, S. (2009) Introduction: Exploring the interface between corpus linguistics and discourse analysis. In M. Charles, D. Pecorari and S. Hunston (eds) Academic Writing: At the Interface of Corpus and Discourse, 1–10. London: Continuum.
Comparato, G. (2014) New voices: Challenging legal culture. European Journal of Legal Studies 7 (2): 5–17.
Doyle, O. (2008) Constitutional Law: Text, Cases and Materials. Dublin: Clarus Press.
Feteris, E. T. (2002) A pragma-dialectical approach of the analysis and evaluation of pragmatic argumentation in a legal context. Argumentation 16 (3): 349–367. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1019999606665
Gabrielatos, C., McEnery, T., Diggle, P. J. and Baker, P. (2012) The peaks and troughs of corpus-based contextual analysis. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 17 (2): 151–175. https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.17.2.01gab
Goodrich, P. (1987) Legal Discourse. Basingstoke, UK: MacMillan.
Goźdź-Roszkowski, S. (2011) Patterns of Linguistic Variation in American Legal English: A Corpus-Based Study. Bern: Peter Lang. https://doi.org/10.3726/978-3-653-00659-9
Groom, N. (2010) Closed-class keywords and corpus-driven discourse analysis. In M. Bondi and M. Scott (eds) Keyness in Texts, 59–78. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.41.05gro
Hunston, S. (2008) Starting with the small words: Patterns, lexis and semantic sequences. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 13 (3): 271–295. https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.13.3.03hun
Juthe, A. (2005) Argument by analogy. Argumentation 19 (1): 1–27. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10503-005-2314-9
Law, S. (2015) From multiple legal cultures to one legal culture? Thinking about culture, tradition and identity in European private law development. Utrecht Journal of International and European Law 31 (81): 68–87. https://doi.org/10.5334/ujiel.dg
Mazzi, D. (2007) The Linguistic Study of Judicial Argumentation. Theoretical Perspectives, Analytical Insights. Modena: Il Fiorino.
McEnery, T. and Hardie, A. (2011) Corpus Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511981395
Morgan, D. G. (2001) A Judgment Too Far? Judicial Activism and the Constitution. Cork: Cork University Press.
Ó Beoláin v. Fahy (2001) IESC 37; (2001) 2 IR 279. Available at: http://www.bailii.org/ie/cases/IESC/2001/
Ó Cearúil, M. (1999) Bunreacht na hÉireann. A Study of the Irish Text. Dublin: Stationery Office of the Government of Ireland.
Ó Conaill, S. (2014) Judicial pragmatism at the expense of language rights: the Ó Maicín decision. Available at: http://constitutionproject.ie/?p=309
Ó Foghludha v. McClean (1934) IR 469. Available at: http://www.coimisineir.ie/downloads/LanguageRights.pdf
Ochs, E. (1993) Constructing social identity: A language socialization perspective. Research on Language and Social Interaction 26 (3): 287–306. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327973rlsi2603_3
Partington, A., Duguid, A. and Taylor, C. (2013) Patterns and Meanings in Discourse: Theory and Practice in Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (CADS). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.55
Peczenik, A. (1989) On Law and Reason. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Pontrandolfo, G. (2013) La fraseología como estilema del lenguaje judicial: El caso de las locuciones prepositivas desde una perspectiva contrastiva. In L. Chierichetti and G. Garofalo (eds) Discurso Profesional y Lingüística de Corpus: Perspectivas de Investigación, 187–215. Bergamo: CELSB.
Rigotti, E. and Greco Morasso. S. (2010) Comparing the Argumentum Model of Topics to other contemporary approaches to argument schemes: The procedural and material components. Argumentation 24 (4): 489–512. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10503-010-9190-7
Sinclair, J. (2004) Trust the Text: Language, Corpus and Discourse. London and New York: Routledge.
Snoeck Henkemans, A. F. (2003) Complex argumentation in a critical discussion. Argumentation 17 (4): 405–419. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1026390419589
Stubbs, M. (2001) Words and Phrases: Corpus Studies on Lexical Semantics. Oxford: Blackwell.
Van De Mieroop, D. (2007) The complementarity of two identities and two approaches: Quantitative and qualitative analysis of institutional and professional identity. Journal of Pragmatics 39: 1120–1142. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2006.01.009
van Eemeren, F. H. (2016) Identifying argumentative patterns: A vital step in the development of pragma-dialectics. Argumentation 30: 1–23. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10503-015-9377-z
van Eemeren, F. H. and Grootendorst, R. (1992) Argumentation, Communication, and Fallacies. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
van Eemeren, F. H., Houtlosser, P. and Snoeck Henkemans, A. F. (2007) Argumentative Indicators in Discourse: A Pragma-Dialectical Approach. Dordrecht: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-6244-5
van Poppel, L. (2012) Pragmatic argumentation in health brochures. Journal of Argumentation in Context 1 (1): 97–112. https://doi.org/10.1075/jaic.1.1.08pop