| Abstrakt: |
It appears that we know surprisingly little about how judges frame linguistically the rationale behind their decisions and how such texts are structured. Using the concept of rhetorical moves (Swales in Genre analysis: English in academic and research settings, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1990; Bhatia in Analyzing genre-language use in professional settings, Longman, London, 1993, Worlds of written discourse. A genre-based view, Continuum, London, 2004), this paper adopts a genre-based approach to examine the rhetorical structure of legal justifications provided in the decisions of the Polish Constitutional Court (Trybunał Konstytucyjny). The goal of the study is to verify the claim that the way justifications are drafted is becoming more and more uniform and conventional. The results show that there is a common core of rhetorical structure realized by means of recurrent functional segments of text. This paper proposes a prototypical move structure of a Constitutional Tribunal justification and it argues that that the way justifications are drafted are subject to very concrete, even if not explicitly stated constraints. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
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