Abstract
The aim of the paper is to analyze the judgment as a legal genre whereby causality relations behave in a particular way depending on the type of the connective used. The relations of causality are described against a background of interactional linguistics, semantic and lexical vagueness as well as the degree of subjectivity in the selected types of causality. The emphasis in the present analysis is on the epistemic causality as the one most closely related to the judicial discourse and the language of law. In this type of causality it is the author who becomes the source of a logical continuum between the cause and effect as opposed to the other extremity where the source is outside the speaker. The analysed corpus consists of 20 judgments of the European Court of Human Rights (altogether 496 sentences have been identified where particular causal connectives were present) issued between 2007 and 2013 and available at the official site of the court: http://www.echr.coe.int/ECHR/homepage_en. The judgments have been selected in order to identify and conduct a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the relation of causality as realized by three English causal connectives: because, as and therefore.
Highlights
Causality as such can be deemed to be the driving force in science, in particular in the humanities and the history of mankind
(iii) Epistemic causality: a causal relation is constructed on the illocutionary level, between a conclusion of the author presented as the causal effect and an argument functioning as the causal antecedent
Apart from determining the degree to which the speaker is present in an utterance, those who reconstruct the sequence of events, notably judges and law enforcement agencies, often face the multiplicity of single events, more or less relevant for the case, which have led to a prohibited act under investigation
Summary
Causality as such can be deemed to be the driving force in science, in particular in the humanities and the history of mankind. Apart from determining the degree to which the speaker is present in an utterance, those who reconstruct the sequence of events, notably judges and law enforcement agencies, often face the multiplicity of single events, more or less relevant for the case, which have led to a prohibited act under investigation In such situations determining which of the events was the key factor in the cause-and-effect chain might require resorting to some hypothesis. (ii) The adequacy theory (the theory of typical causality) limits the liability to only those causes that appear likely to have brought about a crime (according to laws of adequacy, typicality, common sense) This means that to become valid, the cause has to be deemed as such by the judge. We need to apply the norm and compare it with the reality (subsumption) (Dukiet-Nagórska 2008, 90-92, translation mine)
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