ABSTRACT
This chapter contributes to identifying the nexus of voices that are present in arbitration awards, examining in particular language reports. The analysis, carried out on a corpus of international arbitration awards, confirms the high degree of polyphony which characterizes this text genre, and highlights a massive presence of reported language. A qualitative analysis of the corpus has been carried out in a discourse-analytical framework, relying in particular on instruments specifically developed for the analysis of language reports and dialogism. As Thompson points out in his fundamental study of language reports in academic discourse, the last few decades have seen several studies which have departed from traditional grammatical accounts of reported speech based on grammatical transformations, in order to produce semantically-based discription. The textual structure of the abstract is intrinsically interactional, organized as it is as a chain of actions and counteractions mostly verbal referring to exchanges of various types of oral and written texts between the parties.
