Corpus perspectives on pragmatic argumentation in US Supreme Court judgments
Davide Mazzi | Università degli Studi di Modena e Reggio Emilia
Of the various subtypes of causal argumentation, one that has been sparking the interest of a large number of scholars across various contexts is pragmatic argumentation. This paper aims at undertaking an exploratory study of discursive indicators of pragmatic argumentation in a synchronic corpus of judgments by the Supreme Court of the United States of America. The study began with a qualitative overview to be followed by a more quantitative investigation, in which discursive indicators of pragmatic argumentation were lemmatized and searched for at a corpus level. Data show both the tendency of lemmas to occur within larger patterns, and the way these are correlated with an outline of both desirable and undesirable consequences the judge may draw the attention to. Findings thus appear to offer food for thought in the three largely interrelated areas of argumentation, discourse studies and legal theory.
1989A Theory of Legal Argumentation. The Theory of Rational Discourse as Theory of Legal Justification. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Aristotele
1980The Nicomachean Ethics. Translated with an introduction by David Ross. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bell, John
1989“Policy Arguments in Statutory Interpretation.” In Legal Reasoning and Statutory Interpretation, ed. by Jan van Dunné, 55–79. Arnhem: Gouda Quint.
Bustamante, Thomas
2013“On the Argumentum ad Absurdum in Statutory Interpretation: Its Uses and Normative Significance.” In Legal Argumentation Theory: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives, ed. by Christian Dahlman, and Eveline T. Feteris, 21–44. Dordrecht: Springer.
Carbonell, Flavia
2013“Reasoning by Consequences: Applying Different Argumentation Structures to the Analysis of Consequentialist Reasoning in Judicial Decisions.” In Legal Argumentation Theory: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives, ed. by Christian Dahlman, and Eveline T. Feteris, 1–20. Dordrecht: Springer.
Chong, Dennis, and James Druckman
2006“A Theory of Framing and Opinion Formation in Competitive Elite Environments.”Journal of Communication 571: 99–118.
Feteris, Eveline T
2002“A Pragma-Dialectical Approach of the Analysis and Evaluation of Pragmatic Argumentation in a Legal Context.”Argumentation 161: 349–367.
Ihnen Jory, Constanza
2012Pragmatic Argumentation in Law-Making Debates: Instruments for the Analysis and Evaluation of Pragmatic Argumentation at the Second Reading of the British Parliament. Doctoral dissertation, Amsterdam: Sic Sat.
2012b“‘Such a Reaction Would Spread all over the Cell like a Forest Fire’: A Corpus Study of Argument by Analogy in Scientific Discourse.” In Insights into Academic Genres, ed. by Carol Berkenkotter, Vijay K. Bhatia, and Maurizio Gotti, 89–105. Bern: Peter Lang.
Miglioli, Franco
1995“The United States of America.” In Legal English, ed. by Giuliana Garzone, Franco Miglioli, and Rita Salvi, 193–328. Milan: Egea.
Scott, Mike
2008WordSmith Tools 5.0. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Sinclair, John
1996“The Search for Units of Meaning.”Textus 91: 75–106.
Sinclair, John
1998“The Lexical Item.” In Contrastive Lexical Semantics, ed. by Edda Weigand, 1–24. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Sinclair, John
2004Trust the Text. Language, Corpus and Discourse. London: Routledge.
Stubbs, Michael
2001Words and Phrases: Corpus Studies in Lexical Semantics. Oxford: Blackwell.
Summers, Robert
1991“Statutory Interpretation in the United States.” In Interpreting Statutes, ed. by Neil MacCormick, and Robert Summers, 407–459. Aldershot: Dartmouth.
Van Eemeren, Frans H., and Rob Grootendorst
1992Argumentation, Communication and Fallacies. A Pragma-Dialectical Perspective. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Van Eemeren, Frans H., Peter Houtlosser, and A. Francisca Snoeck Henkemans
2007Argumentative Indicators in Discourse. A Pragma-Dialectical Study. Dordrecht: Springer.
2021. A corpus-based examination of reflexive metadiscourse in majority and dissent opinions of the U.S. Supreme Court. Journal of Pragmatics 186 ► pp. 224 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 1 april 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.