Linguistic variation in supreme court oral arguments by legal professionals: A novel multi-dimensional analysis
Dados Bibliográficos
AUTOR(ES) | |
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AFILIAÇÃO(ÕES) | Xi’an Jiaotong University, PR China |
ANO | 2024 |
TIPO | Artigo |
PERIÓDICO | Discourse Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education |
ISSN | 0159-6306 |
E-ISSN | 1469-3585 |
DOI | 10.1177/14614456231221075 |
ADICIONADO EM | 2025-08-18 |
Resumo
This study uses the method of novel Multi-Dimensional Analysis to compare the discourses of justices, appellant's attorneys, and respondent's attorneys to provide a corpus-based description of linguistic co-occurrence patterns in their registers during oral arguments based on the extracted seven functional dimensions: (1) Instructive argumentation versus Informational production; (2) Elaborative exposition; (3) Concern with degree; (4) Concern with projection; (5) Narrative versus Non-narrative expression; (6) Impersonal expression; and (7) Stance-focused expression. Three profession-based legal corpora, totaling 32,107,839 words, were built using case transcripts from oral arguments between 1979 and 2014. The results show that justices are more argumentative, concerned with degrees, projection-, and stance-focused than attorneys. Attorneys are more informative, elaborative, narrative, and impersonal than justices. Among attorneys, appellant's attorneys are relatively more informative, elaborative and impersonal, and less projection-concerned than respondent's attorneys. This study has implications for MD analysis, courtroom discourse analysis, language pedagogy, and accounting research.