Attitude and Graduation: Appraisal Resources in a Decision of the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights

Vincent Mbahawa Chefor ,Xin Zhi-Ying ,Ae Mon Kyaw

doi:10.7176/jlll/77-04

Abstract

Court Judgments are classified within the legal genre of case-law, which is intended to be objective and impartial. However, despite efforts to conceal speakers’ presence and subjectivity in this context, stance must be taken in pronouncing judgment. This study seeks to understand how linguistic attitude and graduation resources are expressed in legal texts and to examine the mechanisms used for this purpose. The text chosen for analysis is a 2017 judgment of the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights (ACHPR) titled: the “African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights V. Republic of Kenya”. The applicant, in respect of the Ogiek community of the Greater Mau Forest in the Republic of Kenya, submits to the ACHPR, denouncing violation of Articles 1, 2, 4, and 17 (2) and (3) of the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights by the Republic of Kenya. In order to determine the semantic nature of the linguistic elements set up in this judgement, the Attitude and Graduation systems of the Appraisal theory (Martin and White 2005) in Systemic Functional Linguistics, as well as some conceptual instruments of Raccah’s (2005) Semantic Structure of Points of View (SSPV) are applied to the selected corpus. Keywords: Attitude system, Graduation system, Appraisal framework, points of view, ACHPR, Court judgement DOI: 10.7176/JLLL/77-04 Publication date: March 31 st 2021

Highlights

As tools meant for societal regulation, legal texts are closely connected to specific linguistic and cultural communities, serving as a mirror to the balance of power that is established between members of these communities
Theoretical framework Raccah’s (2005a, 2005b) descriptive theory of the Semantic Structure of Points of View, which derives from the Language Argumentation theory by Anscombre and Ducrot (1983) has proved to be relevant for discourse analysis because it helps to account for the vital instructions of the lexical units and their effects in the construction of meaning
3.2 The analytical process To approach the linguistic elements that express the evaluation and intervention of the ACHPR in the text, this study specially examines the answers of the Court to the applicant's allegations

Summary

Introduction

As tools meant for societal regulation, legal texts are closely connected to specific linguistic and cultural communities, serving as a mirror to the balance of power that is established between members of these communities. Analyzing a judgment of the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights (ACHPR) will help shed light on the objectivity and subjectivity dichotomy specific to most legal texts, given its characteristic as representing a legal genre: the case-law (Berukstiene 2016).

Results

Conclusion