Research objectives

The objective of the present research is to provide insight into the organisation of judicial argumentative discourse by way of a cross-linguistic quantitative and qualitative study of recurrent schemata and signalling of collaboration in judicial argumentation. Since no study of Concession in the discourse of judges has been undertaken to date (to the best of my knowledge), and given the fact that it is a promising field of research that seems not to have received due attention, the area of investigation was narrowed down to the realisation of this discourse-pragmatic relation. Drawing on the interactional concept of Concession designed by Couper-Kuhlen and Thompson (1999, 2000) and further advanced in Barth (2000) and Barth-Weingarten (2003), the research is intended to serve as a yet another contribution to the description of this discourse phenomenon, complementing previous studies.

The analysis of the realisation of Concession in the discourse of judges was designed as a cross-linguistic genre-based study of lexical and grammatical devices that are relevant in the realisation of Concession in the written mode of language, both in judicial English and in judicial Polish. Notably, in contrast to earlier studies on concessivity, the signals discussed in the present analysis include not only primary concessive markers believed to cue only one relation, such as conjuncts and connectives, but also other, pragmatically relevant types of signalling, be it attitudinal adverbs, evaluative adjectives, epistemically modifying nouns, cleft sentences or the emphatic “do.”