Argumentative styles as cultural identity traits in legal studies

Abstract

The main focus of the paper is the expression of identity in academic texts dealing with legal subjects. This represents the final stage of a research project which has investigated authorial ethos primarily in relation to the writers' profession and the juridical system at the basis of their legal expertise, with little focus on eminently culture-based aspects like argumentation styles. The present analysis is intended to fill such a gap by comparing the different argumentative strategies employed by native (NS) and non-native speakers of English (NNS) in discussing legal subjects. This study will be based on a sub-corpus of CADIS (Corpus of Academic Discourse, compiled by the University of Bergamo, cf. Gotti 2006) consisting of 80 articles - 40 authored by NS and 40 by NNS - taken from major publications in legal studies, namely, the European Journal of International Law, the Yale Law Journal, the Harvard Law Review, the Harvard International Law Journal, the European Law Journal, the International Review of Law and Economics. These journals are places where different kinds of juridical expertise, rhetorical styles and different levels of linguistic competence meet, thus representing an interesting source of investigation in that authors use English as a common language to discuss legal matters from different perspectives. The analysis of the discourses used by NS and NNS, based on previous studies on identity and discourse (Milton / Hyland 1996, Duszak 1997, Flottum 2006), will focus mainly on the interactive and epistemic level of discourse. On the one hand, the analysis of first person pronouns, of interactional structures like imperative and interrogative forms, and of meta-textual strategies, will provide grounds to measure the different degree of personalisation, of solidarity and of reader-inclusiveness employed by NS and NNS (Nichols 1988, Swales et al. 1998, Hyland 2002). On the other hand, the focus on the different modes of argumentation and of data organization (i.e., through negative and/or concessive constructions), and on the use of mitigation, will provide evidence to discuss the different levels of assertiveness by which the authors balance objective information and subjective evaluation to construct specific authorial ethos (Duszak 1994, Hyland 1998, 2001).