Context and genre in judicial argumentation: a case-study

This chapter takes into consideration the role of context in the production of judicial texts, focusing on judgements as a genre which displays special argumentative and textual characters. The purpose of the research, hinged on a case study, is to investigate how deeply and in which ways some features of the professional community generating an argumentative text – namely, the legal system and the traditional rules typical of the judicial community in the Italian tradition – influence both the logic and the linguistic structure. The case study combines quantitative and qualitative analysis. Frequency lists and concordance lines produced with the Wordsmith Tools software are analysed and compared with data emerging from qualitative investigation in a discourse-based perspective, focusing on the actual use of argumentation. The analysis shows how the judge develops the argumentative line, taking a stand in the interlocutive dimension, and thus complying with legislative and discursive norms typical of the Italian judicial context.