Judgments of the English and Spanish Supreme Courts

Abstract

This study aims to explore the differences between English and Spanish judgments in criminal cases from the supreme courts of the UK and Spain using Biber’s Multidimensional Analysis. We compiled a corpus of twenty judgments from the supreme courts of Spain and the UK (ten from each country), whose parts of speech were tagged using the Free CLAWS web tagger and Grampal. The frequency of the eight selected linguistic features was obtained by using the corpus toolkit AntConc. We performed an exploratory factor analysis in both subcorpora to determine the latent structure behind all the linguistic features. Three textual dimensions were found in English: persuasion vs. power distance, subjectivity vs. objectivity, and involved vs. informational focus; and four factors representing three dimensions were found in Spanish: subjectivity vs. objectivity, intertextuality, involved and informational focus. The English corpus has prevalent persuasion, objectivity, and informational focus; the Spanish corpus has no relevant intertextuality scores, a prevalent subjectivity, and informational focus.