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.
Highlights
While due emphasis has been placed on principles of constitutional interpretation from the practitioner‟s perspective (Doyle 2008), there is still a remarkable lack of groundwork on the overall discursive dimension of, first of all, judicial argumentation at work in cases involving bilingual rights and language policy and, secondly, the underlying constitutional ethos of the Irish judiciary
The latter appears to be intimately tied to the notion of „constitutional identity‟ discussed by Besselink (2010)
To the extent that constitutional infrastructure can be seen as an expression of complex cultural phenomena, “one of the most intriguing questions” seems to be “who is to decide on what the constitutional identity of a Member State is” (Besselink 2010: 48)
Summary
While due emphasis has been placed on principles of constitutional interpretation from the practitioner‟s perspective (Doyle 2008), there is still a remarkable lack of groundwork on the overall discursive dimension of, first of all, judicial argumentation at work in cases involving bilingual rights and language policy and, secondly, the underlying constitutional ethos of the Irish judiciary. The latter appears to be intimately tied to the notion of „constitutional identity‟ discussed by Besselink (2010). The two-pronged approach pursued here is intended to identify phraseological and argumentative regularities in the construction of texts that forge the Court‟s own constitutional identity in an area so far overlooked by corpus and discourse studies of judicial argumentation
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