Argumentative strategies in the judgments of the European Court of Justice. On the use of connectives in French and English judgments

The argumentative nature of judicial texts has been pointed out by various authors (cf. Perelman 1980; Aarnio 1989; Alexy 1989; Peczenik 1989; Feteris 2002). However, the importance of language in the construction of argumentation in judicial settings has been largely underestimated. The aim of this chapter is thus to provide new insights in the description of the linguistic component of argumentation in legal discourse, by presenting results of a comparative analysis of argumentative connectives in the judgments of the European Court of Justice (CJEU) issued in French and translated into English. As French is the procedural language, our objective is to discuss whether and to what extent translators make recourse to one-to-one equivalence or, conversely, one-to-many equivalence, or to reduction (Malone 1988).
The analysis was carried out on two parallel corpora of judgements of the CJEU in the years 2008-2013. The first corpus consists of the original French version of the judgements (CJEU_Fr); the second one consists of their English translations (CJEU_En). To test our claims on a possible influence of the French language on the use of connectives in the English translations, we also compared the CJEU_En corpus to a reference corpus of judgements delivered by the House of Lords (UK) (HoL corpus)
As for methodology, we relied on the integration of discourse and corpus analysis tools basing our theoretical framework on Perelman (1979) and on Riegel et al.’s (1999) classification of argumentative connectives.
Results show a massive use of connectives in French judgements. However, a more frequent use of argumentative connectives can be observed in CJEU_EN corpus rather than in the HoL corpus providing evidence for the influence of the original French version on the English translations of CJEU Judgements.