Unit:
Κατεύθυνση ΓλωσσολογίαLibrary of the School of Philosophy
Supervisors info:
Γούτσος Διονύσιος (Καθηγητής Κειμενογλωσσολογίας, Τομέα Γλωσσολογίας, Τμήμα Φιλολογίας, Τομέας Γλωσσολογίας, ΕΚΠΑ)
Κουτσουλέλου-Μίχου Σταματίνα (Αναπληρώτρια Καθηγήτρια Γλωσσολογίας και Ανάλυσης Ομιλίας, Τομέα Γλωσσολογίας, Τμήμα Φιλολογίας, ΕΚΠΑ)
Παναρέτου Ελένη (Αναπληρώτρια Καθηγήτρια Γλωσσολογίας, Τομέας Γλωσσολογίας, Τμήμα Φιλολογίας, ΕΚΠΑ)
Original Title:
Εκθέσεις πρακτικών των ποινικών δικαστικών αποφάσεων: υπολογιστική και κειμενογλωσσολογική προσέγγιση
Translated title:
Criminal court decision minutes: computational and text-linguistic analysis
Summary:
The legal language, a “Language for Specific Purposes” applicable in various legal texts, has been well-explored in the international bibliography. On the contrary, there are limited Greek studies for the same topic, which only focus on the language used in laws and court decisions. This prototypical thesis aspires to fill this research gap by examining the textual subtype of court decisions’ minutes in a linguistic, textual, and cognitive manner by combining the fields of Forensic Linguistics and Text Linguistics. Also, it comprises a statistical analysis of 820 court decisions’ minutes of the Athens’ Single-Judge Court of First Instance of 1990, using the methodology of Corpus Linguistics and the tools of AntConc 3.4.3 Software. The purpose of this quantitative analysis is to examine the general judges’ language choices compared to the Secretaries’ and the defendants’/witnesses’ language. Finally, the comparison of male versus female judges’ linguistic preferences proves whether female Judges eliminate their gender in the legal context.
The results show that Judges use a significantly different collection of word mechanisms, such as legal homonyms, umbrella terms, technical vocabulary, legalese, which are not present in the witness testimonies or the defense apologies. At the same time, on a textual level, they focus on the context and, on a communicative level, they strengthen the declarative nature of minutes. On the contrary, Secretaries choose a significantly more academic and technical vocabulary than the Judges, in addition to abbreviations, initials, and numbers. Also, there is an early statistical indication that Secretaries may intervene linguistically in judicial decisions. However, these indications are not enough to safely draw such a conclusion due to the limited number of tokens in their subtext and the lack of case studies between specific Secretaries and Judges. Finally, even though both sexes of the Judges may choose the typical lexical and syntactic patterns of the legal language, each subgroup makes significantly distinct lexicographical and structural choices, proving that women Judges do not eliminate their gender.
Main subject category:
Language – Literature
Keywords:
legal language, Language for Specific Purposes (lsp), text type/genre, Text Linguistics, minutes, Forensic Linguistics, corpora, Corpus Linguistics, AntConc, court decisions, keyness, wordlists, n-grams
Number of references:
121
