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Reporting Verbs in Court Judgments of the Common Law System: A Corpus-Based Study

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International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Professionals in various disciplines adopt significantly different lexicons to report their discoveries and arguments. Scientists discover, philosophers argue, whereas legal practitioners apply and consider. Reporting, as a ubiquitous linguistic phenomenon, has its disciplinary characteristics. In court judgments, it reflects the way judges identify the evidence of different documents or other courts. In the self-built court judgment corpus, the paper focuses on the way that judicial arguments are constructed through reporting verbs. On the basis of the analysis of the representation and distribution of reporting verbs in court judgments, the study identifies the reporting verbs with high frequencies in court judgments and compares these reporting verbs with those in the comparable reference corpus, written sampler of British National Corpus, which works as a reference corpus. It is found that (1) the tokens of reporting verbs in court judgments are slightly less than those in general texts; (2) the distribution pattern of the speech act verbs and mental verbs in the self-built court judgment corpus is similar to the pattern of two kinds of reporting verbs in the reference corpus; (3) judicial speech act verbs are employed to express the authority of the statements, whereas the judicial mental verbs illustrate the legal reasoning process with individual agents; and (4) there is a significant difference in terms of the reporting verbs’ frequencies within the court judgments and general texts. The results show that the reporting verbs in court judgments have their uniqueness, which may cast light on both judicial and pedagogical practices.

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Notes

  1. https://www.supremecourt.uk/about/uk-judicial-system.html (accessed on March 30, 2019).

  2. http://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/claws1tags.html (accessed on April 6, 2019).

  3. http://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/usas/semtags_subcategories.txt (accessed on April 6, 2019).

  4. http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/corpus/index.xml?ID = products#sampler (accessed on June 26, 2019).

  5. http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/corpus/sampler/sampler.pdf (accessed on June 26, 2019).

  6. https://www.merriam-webster.com/(accessed on June 30, 2019).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of International Studies, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China

    Wei Yu

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  1. Wei Yu
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Correspondence to Wei Yu.

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Appendix (Order of Judgment Date)

Appendix (Order of Judgment Date)

UKSC 2017/0185

UKSC 2017/0151

UKSC 2017/0080

UKSC 2015/0147

UKSC 2017/0127

UKSC 2016/0219

UKSC 2016/0204

UKSC 2016/0082

UKSC 2017/0110

UKSC 2017/0212

UKSC 2016/0214

UKSC 2015/0022

UKSC 2018/0045

UKSC 2017/0097

UKSC 2018/0011

UKSC 2016/0052

UKSC 2017/0096

UKSC 2017/0075

UKSC 2017/0060

UKSC 2016/0130

UKSC 2017/0214

UKSC 2017/0083

UKSC 2017/0016

UKSC 2016/0070

UKSC 2017/0158

UKSC 2016/0197

UKSC 2016/0137

UKSC 2016/0175

UKSC 2017/0072

UKSC 2016/0210

UKSC 2017/0053

UKSC 2016/0188

UKSC 2018/0013

UKSC 2016/0218

UKSC 2016/0159

UKSC 2016/0174

UKSC 2017/0211

UKSC 2016/0107

UKSC 2017/0131

UKSC 2016/0156

UKSC 2017/0124

UKSC 2017/0103

UKSC 2016/0192

UKSC 2017/0025

UKSC 2017/0159

UKSC 2017/0073

UKSC 2016/0185

UKSC 2016/0142

UKSC 2017/0200

UKSC 2017/0070

UKSC 2016/0152

UKSC 2016/0053

UKSC 2017/0058

UKSC 2017/0020

UKSC 2016/0132

UKSC 2015/0215

UKSC 2017/0115

UKSC 2017/0035

UKSC 2016/0170

UKSC 2016/0062

UKSC 2017/0092

UKSC 2016/0144

UKSC 2016/0226

UKSC 2016/0084

UKSC 2016/0223

UKSC 2017/0202

UKSC 2016/0150

UKSC 2015/0177

UKSC 2016/0195

UKSC 2017/0023

UKSC 2016/0111

UKSC 2016/0079

UKSC 2016/0227

UKSC 2016/0121

UKSC 2016/0136

UKSC 2016/0164

UKSC 2018/0167

UKSC 2018/0091

UKSC 2015/0166

UKSC 2016/0213

UKSC 2017/0132

UKSC 2017/0077

UKSC 2016/0148

UKSC 2016/0157

UKSC 2018/0037

UKSC 2017/0003

UKSC 2015/0243

UKSC 2016/0041

UKSC 2017/0141

UKSC 2016/0102

UKSC 2017/0135

UKSC 2015/0199

UKSC 2018/0080

UKSC 2017/0040

UKSC 2016/0166

UKSC 2015/0110

UKSC 2017/0160

UKSC 2017/0037

UKSC 2016/0165

UKSC 2015/0063

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Yu, W. Reporting Verbs in Court Judgments of the Common Law System: A Corpus-Based Study. Int J Semiot Law 34, 525–560 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-020-09740-7

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