That-complement clauses signalling stance in Nigerian Supreme Court lead judgements: a corpus-based study

The study investigates grammatical means of marking stance in Nigerian Supreme Court lead judgements. Specifically, it examines the frequency, form and stance functions of that-complement clauses in lead judgements using Du Bios’ stance triangle model (Du Bois, John. 2007. The stance triangle. In Englebretson Robert (ed.), Stancetaking in discourse: Subjectivity, evaluation, interaction, 139–177. Amsterdam: John Benjamins) and Biber’s (Biber, Douglas. 2006. University language: A corpus-based study of spoken and written registers. Amsterdam: John Benjamins) semantic domains of verbal and adjectival predicates controlling that-complement clauses. The study shows that that-complement clauses in the lead judgements are predominantly verb-based and they mainly signal epistemic and few alignment stances. Verb-based that-clauses are largely indexed by communication verbs which report prior stances, present the lead judges’ arguments and validate them. Adjective-based that-clauses signal evaluative and few affective stances. They are frequently signalled by certainty adjectives which express lead judges’ certitude on the issues argued. That-complement clauses signal few alignment stances and yet fewer affective ones, possibly due to judges’ need to assert their authoritative voice as experts in the discourse community. The frequency of certainty verbs and adjectives in the that-complement clauses underscores the centrality of certitude in judicial argumentation. I suggest that judgements are not only evaluative as has been noted in earlier studies but also epistemic based on the predominance of epistemic and certainty markers lexico-grammatically realised and indexed by verb and adjective based that-clauses.