Politeness instances in the judgment text genre and its contribution to the interactional relationship

• Autor(a) principal: Teixeira, Joana
• Data de Publicação: 2018
• Outros Autores: Pinto, Alexandra Guedes
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: https://ojs.letras.up.pt/index.php/re/article/view/6202

This work is part of a larger investigation whose scope is the study of the legal discourse in the judgment genre. Among the various hypotheses that have been put forward, the importance of analyzing some linguistic instances of politeness in this kind of text was evidenced, as an element of construction of the interactional relationship and, within this, of two poles in the interpersonal hierarchy: the pole of the defendant (s) and the pole of the other juridical entities, members of the judicial process, portrayed in the speech as occupying a higher hierarchical level. In fact, the reading of second and third instance judgments, in which decisions of first instance courts are reanalyzed, made it possible to verify that, when there is a correction and annulment of a previous decision, the reference to the instance that took it is made by using various elements of politeness (such as nominal expressions, adjectives, adverbs and other linguistic expressions) which mitigate the fact that the decision is being annulled. There is also occurrence of elements of social deixis as a way of raising these entities or their stakeholders. On the other hand, as has noted the study made for the Spanish context by the Spanish Ministry of Justice (2011) “Claridad y derecho a comprender: Comisión para la modernización del lengaje jurídico”, references to defendants and to those who do not belong to the judicial social sphere are made in a less solemn way than those used to refer to legal/judicial agents, in particular as far as forms of treatment are concerned (but not ending there). Despite the fact that the judgment is recorded in written support, we adopt the perspective of Bakhtine & Volochinov (1977), and other authors ever since, for whom all discourses, even those that appear to be monological, are, by their semantic and stylistic structure, dialogic. In the written judgment there is no conventional dialogue, with verbal interaction, between the magistrate and the accused / applicant and between the magistrate and other magistrates, but there is a latent dialogue, which implies the construction of a relationship between I and one or several YOU’s. We undertake this work through the study of diverse categories of linguistic analysis, such as personal pronouns, verbal inflection (person and number), nominal and adjectival expressions, among others, using software VISL (Visual Interactive Syntax Learning) to map the corpus.