Abstract
The paper presents a contrastive corpus-assisted discourse study of sentence adverbs in Italian, English and Spanish judicial discourse.The hypothesis guiding the study is that, although judges’ attitude is supposed to be impartial, as they represent the so-called “bouche de la loi”, their opinion is present in the texts and sentence adverbs are one of the pragmatic vehicles used to express their stance.The corpus used for the analysis is a trilingual subcorpus of COSPE (Pontrandolfo 2016) that has been POS-tagged (194,000 tokens for each language). The focus has then been placed exclusively on adverbs ending in -mente and -ly for being those that more than others contribute to express evaluative nuances in judicial discourse.Results demonstrate that quantitatively adverbs in -mente/-ly do not account for a significant percentage, which is in line with Biber et al.’s (1999) findings in other registers (conversation, academic prose). However, qualitatively and discursively, these adverbs play a pivotal role at a pragmatic level, since they contribute to judicial argumentation (cf., among others, Mazzi 2014).
Highlights
The paper presents a contrastive corpus-assisted discourse study of sentence adverbs in Italian, English and Spanish judicial discourse
The reason why the number of sentence adverbs decreases compared to the percentage of adverbs ending in -mente/-ly lies in the fact that most of the latter are found in collocations like adverbs + adjective/past participle or adverbs + verbs7 which, evaluative in their meanings, only refer to nouns and not to the whole sentence
Sentence adverbs ending in -mente/-ly do not play a crucial role in conveying stance: the judges’ attitude is conveyed mostly through adverbs of manner, as well as adjectives (Pontrandolfo/Goźdź-Roszkowski 2014)
Summary
The paper presents a contrastive corpus-assisted discourse study of sentence adverbs in Italian, English and Spanish judicial discourse. The hypothesis guiding the study is that, judges’ attitude is supposed to be impartial, as they represent the so-called “bouche de la loi”, their opinion is present in the texts and sentence adverbs are one of the pragmatic vehicles used to express their stance. In formal prose, even those like ‘hopefully’ and ‘thankfully’ shouldn’t appear. Though increasingly common, they have a tarnished history. The “danger” lying in the use of those adverbs is known in the literature as well as in famous judicial decisions, like United States v. In which the Supreme Court was asked to determine the scope of two sentence adverbs used in Section 1001 of the United States Criminal Code
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