Epistemic Modality: A Corpus-Based Analysis of Epistemic Markers in EU and Polish Judgments

Dariusz Koźbiał

Journal & Issue Details

Comparative Legilinguistics

Journal Details

Format: Journal
eISSN: 2391-4491
First Published: 20 Dec 2019
Publication timeframe: 4 times per year
Languages: English

The aim of this paper is to establish the repertoire and distribution of verbal and adverbial exponents of epistemic modality in English- and Polish-language judgments passed by the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU) and non-translated judgments passed by the Supreme Court of Poland (SN). The study applies a model for categorizing exponents of epistemicity with regard to their (i) level (high-, medium- and low-level of certainty, necessity or possibility expressed by the markers; primary dimension), (ii) perspective (own vs. reported perspective), (iii) opinion (based either on facts or beliefs) and (iv) time (the embedding of epistemic markers in sentences relating to the past, present or future) (contextual dimensions). It examines the degree of intra-generic convergence of translated EU judgments and non-translated national judgments in terms of the employment of epistemic markers, as well as the degree of authoritativeness of judicial argumentation, and determines whether the frequent use of epistemic markers constitutes a generic feature of judgments. The research material consists of a parallel corpus of English- and Polish-language versions of 200 EU judgments and a corpus of 200 non-translated domestic judgments. The results point to the high salience and differing patterns of use of epistemic markers in both EU and national judgments. The frequent use of high-level epistemic markers boosts the authoritativeness of judicial reasoning.

Keywords

epistemic modality
corpus study
judgments
Court of Justice of the European Union
Supreme Court of the Republic of Poland

References

Anthony, Laurence. 2017. AntPConc (Version 1.2.1). Tokyo: Waseda University.Search in Google Scholar

Biel, Łucja. 2014. Lost in the Eurofog. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.Search in Google Scholar

Biel, Łucja. 2016. Mixed corpus design for researching the Eurolect: A genre-based comparable-parallel corpus in the PL EUROLECT project. In Polskojęzyczne korpusy równoległe. Polish-language parallel corpora, eds. Ewa Gruszczyńska and Agnieszka Leńko-Szymańska, 197–208. Warsaw: Institute of Applied Linguistics.Search in Google Scholar

Bralczyk, Jerzy. 1978. O leksykalnych wyznacznikach prawdziwościowej oceny sądów [On lexical exponents of truth evaluation of propositions]. Katowice: Uniwersytet Śląski.Search in Google Scholar

Cheng, Winnie and Le Cheng. 2014. Epistemic modality in court judgments: A corpus-driven comparison of civil cases in Hong Kong and Scotland. English for Specific Purposes 33: 15–26.10.1016/j.esp.2013.07.006Search in Google Scholar

Coulthard, Malcolm and Alison Johnson. 2010. The Routledge handbook of forensic linguistics. London: Routledge.10.4324/9780203855607Search in Google Scholar

Danielewiczowa, Magdalena, 2008a. Jak nie należy opisywać przysłówków epistemicznych [How not to describe epistemic adverbs]. Wiener Slawistischer Almanach 72: 109–128.Search in Google Scholar

Danielewiczowa, Magdalena. 2002. Wiedza i niewiedza. Studium polskich czasowników epistemicznych [Knowledge and ignorance. Study of Polish epistemic verbs]. Warsaw: Katedra Lingwistyki Formalnej.Search in Google Scholar

Danielewiczowa, Magdalena. 2008b. Opis przysłówków epistemicznych jako wyzwanie teoretyczne [Description of epistemic adverbs as a theoretical challenge]. Prace Filologiczne LIV. Seria Językoznawcza: 47–62.Search in Google Scholar

Goźdź-Roszkowski, Stanisław. 2017a. Facts in Law. A comparative study of fact that and its phraseologies in American and Polish judicial discourse. In Phraseology in legal and institutional settings: a corpus-based interdisciplinary perspective, eds. Stanisław Goźdź-Roszkowski and Gianluca Pontrandolfo, 143–159. London: Routledge.10.4324/9781315445724-9Search in Google Scholar

Goźdź-Roszkowski, Stanisław. 2017b. Signalling sites of contention in judicial discourse. An exploratory corpus-based analysis of selected stance nouns in US Supreme Court Opinions and Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal Judgments. Comparative Legilinguistics 32, 91–117.10.14746/cl.2017.32.4Search in Google Scholar

Grochowski, Maciej, Anna Kisiel and Magdalena Żabowska. 2014. Słownik gniazdowy partykuł polskich [The Nest Dictionary of Polish Particles]. Kraków: PAU.Search in Google Scholar

Grochowski, Maciej. 1986. Polskie partykuły: składnia, semantyka, leksykografia [Polish particles: syntax, semantics, lexicography]. Prace Instytutu Języka Polskiego PAN 62. Wrocław: Ossolineum.Search in Google Scholar

Grzegorczykowa, Renata. 1998. [1996] Wykłady z polskiej składni [Lectures in Polish syntax], 3^rd ed. Warsaw: PWN.Search in Google Scholar

Grzegorczykowa, Renata. 2001. Wprowadzenie do semantyki językoznawczej [An introduction to linguistic semantics]. Warsaw: PWN.Search in Google Scholar

Halliday, Michael A.K. and Christian Matthiessen. 2004. Introduction to Functional Grammar, 3^rd ed. London: Edward Arnold.Search in Google Scholar

Huddleston, Rodney and Geoffrey K. Pullum. 2002. The Cambridge grammar of the English language. Cambridge: CUP.10.1017/9781316423530Search in Google Scholar

Kilgarriff, Adam, Vít Baisa, Jan Bušta, Miloš Jakubíček, Vojtěch Kovář, Jan Michelfeit, Pavel Rychlý, and Vít Suchomel. 2014. The Sketch Engine: ten years on. Lexicography 1, 7–36.Search in Google Scholar

Matulewska, Aleksandra. 2010. Deontic modality and modals in the language of contracts. Comparative Legilinguistics 2, 75–92.Search in Google Scholar

Mazzi, Davide. 2007b. The construction of argumentation in judicial texts: Combining a genre and a corpus perspective. Argumentation 21(1), 21–38.Search in Google Scholar

Mazzi, Davide. 2015. “It must be obvious that this line of argument is utterly inconsistent…”: on attitudinal qualification in English judicial discourse across legal systems. Bulletin suisse de linguistique appliquée 2, 51–67.Search in Google Scholar

Palmer, Frank R. 2001. Mood and modality. Cambridge: CUP.10.1017/CBO9781139167178Search in Google Scholar

Pontrandolfo, Gianluca and Stanisław Goźdź-Roszkowski, 2014. Exploring the local grammar of evaluation: The case of adjectival patterns in American and Italian judicial discourse. Research in language 12(1), 71–91.10.2478/rela-2014-0014Search in Google Scholar

Rozumko, Agata. 2013. Modal adverbs, particles and discourse markers across languages. Recent attempts at delimiting the categories in Anglophone and Polish linguistics. Białostockie Archiwum Językowe 13, 289–294.Search in Google Scholar

Rozumko, Agata. 2016. Linguistic concepts across languages: The category of epistemic adverbs in English and Polish. Yearbook of the Poznan Linguistic Meeting 2(1), 195–214. DeGruyter Open.10.1515/yplm-2016-0009Search in Google Scholar

Rozumko, Agata. 2017. Adverbial markers of epistemic modality across disciplinary discourses: A contrastive study of research articles in six academic disciplines. Studia Anglica Posnaniensia 52(1), 73–101.Search in Google Scholar

Rubin, Victoria L. 2006. Identifying certainty in texts. PhD diss., Syracuse University.Search in Google Scholar

Rubin, Victoria L. 2010. Epistemic modality: From uncertainty to certainty in the context of information seeking as interactions with texts. Information Processing & Management 46(5), 533–540.Search in Google Scholar

Rubin, Victoria L., Noriki Kando and Elizabeth D. Liddy. 2004. Certainty categorization model. Paper presented at the AAAI spring symposium: Exploring attitude and affect in text: Theories and applications, Stanford, CA.Search in Google Scholar

Rytel, Danuta. 1982. Leksykalne środki wyrażania modalności w języku czeskim i polskim [Lexical means of the expression of modality in Czech and Polish]. Wrocław: Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolińskich.Search in Google Scholar

Salmi-Tolonen, Tarja. 2005. Persuasion in judicial argumentation: The opinions of the Advocates General at the European Court of Justice. In Persuasion across genres. A linguistic approach, eds. Helena Halmari and Tuija Virtanen, 59–101. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins.10.1075/pbns.130.06salSearch in Google Scholar

Scott, Mike. 2017. WordSmith Tools version 7, Stroud: Lexical Analysis Software.Search in Google Scholar

Shethar, Alissa. 2002. Strategic uses of self and other perspectives. In Perspective and perspectivation in discourse, eds. Carl Friedrich Graumann and Werner Kallmeyer, 181–200. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins.10.1075/hcp.9.12sheSearch in Google Scholar

Stępień, Marzena. 2008. O wzajemnym przenikaniu się ewidencjalności i modalności (na przykładzie wybranych polskich czasowników i wyrażeń funkcyjnych) [On the reciprocal influence of evidentiality and modality (on the example of selected Polish verbs and functional expressions)]. In Lexikalische Evidenzialitätsmarker im Slavischen, eds. Björn Wiemer and Vladimir A. Plungjan, Wiener Slawistischer Almanach Sonderband 72, 313–333. München: Otto Sagner.Search in Google Scholar

Szczyrbak, Magdalena. 2017. Modal Adverbs of Certainty in EU Legal Discourse: A Parallel Corpus Approach. In Contrastive Analysis of Discourse-pragmatic Aspects of Linguistic Genres, eds. Karin Aijmer and Diana Lewis, 91–115. Cham: Springer.10.1007/978-3-319-54556-1_5Search in Google Scholar

Tutak, Kinga. 2003. Leksykalne nieczasownikowe wykładniki modalności epistemicznej w autobiografiach [Lexical non-verbal exponents of epistemic modality in autobiographies]. Kraków: Księgarnia Akademicka.Search in Google Scholar

Warchał, Krystyna. 2015. Certainty and doubt in academic discourse: Epistemic modality markers in English and Polish linguistics articles. Katowice: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego.Search in Google Scholar

Wierzbicka, Anna. 2006. English: Meaning and Culture. New York: Oxford University Press.Search in Google Scholar

Żabowska, Magdalena. 2008. Polskie wyrażenia ewidencjalne a partykuły epistemiczne [Polish evidential expressions and epistemic particles]. In Lexikalische Evidenzialitätsmarker im Slavischen, eds. Björn Wiemer and Vladimir A. Plungjan, Wiener Slawistischer Almanach 72, 377–393. München: Otto Sagner.Search in Google Scholar

Żabowska, Magdalena. 2013. Faktycznie i rzeczywiście – operacje na wiedzy i ich leksykalizacja [Actually and indeed – operations on knowledge and their lexicalization]. Linguistica Copernicana 1(9), 131–141.Search in Google Scholar

Case-law of the Supreme Court of Poland. http://www.sn.pl/orzecznictwo/SitePages/Baza_orzeczen.aspx (accessed March 30, 2019).Search in Google Scholar

InfoCuria – Case-law of the Court of Justice. http://curia.europa.eu/juris/recherche.jsf?language=en (accessed March 30, 2019).Search in Google Scholar

The Eurolect: An EU Variant of Polish and its Impact on Administrative Polish. https://eurolekt.ils.uw.edu.pl/ (accessed March 30, 2019).Search in Google Scholar

Wielki słownik języka polskiego PAN [Polish Academy of Sciences Great Dictionary of Polish], ed. P. Żmigrodzki. http://www.wsjp.pl (accessed March 30, 2019).Search in Google Scholar