The linguistic expression of appraisal in judicial decisions: A contrastive study in French and Spanish
Keywords:
Contrastive analysis, appraisal, judicial decisions, health care liabilityAbstract
This paper focuses on the linguistic mechanisms which reflect the speaker’s subjective evaluation of textual contents, as well as on how different enunciative voices are intertwined in texts. In order to examine these evaluative mechanisms, Appraisal Theory (Halliday & Mathiessen, 2004; Martin & White, 2005) is applied to a bilingual corpus on liability in health care. The corpus is made up by twenty judicial decisions issued by both the first civil chamber of the French Tribunal de Cassation and the first civil chamber of the Spanish Tribunal Supremo during the first decade of the 21st century. The linguistic resources analysed in the study are those used by the speaker to convey subjective evaluation about the patient’s initial condition, the medical intervention and the results of medical actions. The contrastive analysis has shed light on similarities and differences between French and Spanish related to evaluative linguistic mechanisms and core values that define healthcare responsibility in each culture.
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