ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that evaluation of status is particularly important to legal justification, and it shows how the status of propositions comprises an essential aspect of legal reasoning and persuasion. Using Sketch Engine as a tool to explore two sets of data, a corpus of US Supreme Court opinions (1,270,049 words in 108 documents) and a corpus of opinions from Poland's Trybunał Konstytucyjny, the Constitutional Tribunal of Poland, it compares the use of status nouns in the N that pattern in English and its Polish counterpart N że/iż. The chapter demonstrates how evaluation of status essentially reifies propositions into the objects of which legal argumentation is comprised, including arguments, conclusions, assumptions and notions. In both judicial contexts, status nouns perform roles that are equally crucial to argumentative discourse: marking cause–result relations, providing confirmation for claim-making and signalling legal standpoints. Among these functions, the link between negative evaluation and argumentation is shown to be particularly conspicuous. Finally, the chapter argues that status nouns contribute to the identification of ‘sites of contention’. That is, they identify the part or segment of a legal justification in which the reader is most likely to encounter a formulation of, or reference to, an argument which assumes the form of its assessment.
