ABSTRACT
Using Sketch Engine as a tool to explore two sets of data, a corpus of US Supreme Court opinions and a corpus of opinions from Poland's Trybunał Konstytucyjny, the Constitutional Tribunal of Poland, this chapter focuses on adjective-centred patterns, formulated in English as it v-link ADJ that and it v-link ADJ to-inf and in Polish as ADV v-link, aby, ADV v-link or ADV. These lexico-grammar patterns are seen as evaluative and persuasive devices deployed with a view to critically assess arguments advanced by various legal actors and toward convincing others that the decisions made were sound. The chapter documents the ways in which the patterns function as ‘argumentation pointers’ because they co-occur with argumentative propositions and can be indicative of argumentative moves. The analysis of the Polish data reveals that the two patterns, it v-link ADJ that and it v-link ADJ to-inf, correspond to a much wider range of Polish syntagmatic patterns that are used to signal the same major functional concerns. The chapter shows how analyzing these patterns offer a useful way of uncovering some of the key mechanisms used in evaluative judicial reasoning and how the use of such recurrent phraseologies is, first and foremost, rhetorically motivated.
