Politeness in Supreme Court decisions

Abstract

This article aims at exploring the (im/)politeness strategies developed in Supreme Courts’ judgments and opinions. For this purpose, various politeness tokens ranging from sharedness markers and approximators to hedging devices and boosters are taken into account. Multi-words such as “you know”, “you see”, “I mean”, “I think”, “kind of” and “please” or “thank you” are analysed in three different corpora. The corpora considered are the following ones: a corpus composed of the judgements of the UK Supreme Court’s; a corpus of the opinions of the US Supreme Court’s, and a corpus of the decisions of the European Court of Justice. The multi-words’ relative frequencies are compared across the corpora and sample phrases are extracted and analysed in detail. In this way, politeness strategies and pragmatic usages come to the fore. The paper findings reveal different distributions of relative frequencies, where the corpus of the ECJ shows the fewest occurrences. The paper also highlights various pragmatic strategies that often go beyond the politeness intents described in the literature. For example, corpus analysis brings to the surface stance markers in reformulation devices or (apparent) hedges, as well as cohesive elements in approximators. Markers of (negative) impoliteness are found in new-information tokens.