Acceso usuarios
Perusa, Italia
The language and linguistic strategies of supreme courts have been increasingly addressed because of the important role played by national and international justices. This paper is aimed at shedding light on the linguistic patterns emerging from three different corpora of supreme courts’ decisions drafted in Italian: a corpus composed of the judgments of the Italian Corte di Cassazione (“Court of Cassation”) and Corte Costituzionale (“Constitutional Court”); a corpus of the decisions of the Swiss Federal Court and the Swiss Cantonal Courts in Italian; and a corpus consisting of the Italian translations of the decisions of the European Court of Human Rights. To unveil linguistic peculiarities, this study focuses on word lists and keyness. The findings indicate that, despite addressing similar topics, each corpus is hallmarked by precise linguistic features. These may be due to stylistic conventions, the functions carried out by the court, and the subject-matters addressed. The analysis, in fact, reveals that the most recurrent words in each corpus are often the key terms of the same corpus, thus underscoring that the language of each court is unique and linguistically relevant, although sharing topical similarities with the other corpora.
