Grounds and Reasons: Argumentative Signals in Judicial Texts

This paper illustrates the first findings of a research project, which aims at developing tools for a linguistic analysis of judicial argumentation. Whereas most research on the process of legal decision-making considers argumentation from the point of view of legal theory and legal philosophy, emphasis is laid here on the role of language in the construction of argumentation, and in particular on features of auxiliary argumentative lexis such as connectives and meta-argumentative expressions. First of all, the paper will discuss the methodology of the project, which will be carried out on a corpus of 221 judgments (1,646,182 words) issued by three courts. Secondly, it will focus on the use of the meta-argumentative expressions ground and reason from a three-fold perspective: textual function, genre structure and argumentative voice. The results presented by the paper will show that ground and reason act as effective argumentative signals in the judicial text.