{"title":"With or without a purpose? Judges’ appraisal of offenders or their behaviour in six sentencing remarks","authors":"Xin Dai","doi":"10.1515/text-2020-0228","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This study examines judges’ language use in sentencing remarks in the Crown Courts of England and Wales. Six sentencing remarks were selected from all those available on the UK judiciary website (by October 2016). The cases selected for closer analysis are as similar to each other as possible, so as to ensure that the differences in the discursive features of the sentencing remarks largely reflect the differences in judges’ sentencing practices. It is found that judges selectively use an appraisal strategy – using moralised purposes to invoke judgements of offenders or their behaviour – across the six sentencing remarks. Judges’ use (or non-use) of the appraisal strategy is found to be correlating with their sentencing decisions: i.e., judges opt for the appraisal strategy when their sentencing decisions are below or further above the starting point, but not when the decisions are just a few years above the starting point. The finding reveals that the statutory starting point exercises a binding effect on the judges’ sentencing practices despite the judges having the discretion to disregard the starting point. Such a finding not only provides an insight into the judges’ sentencing practices, but also demonstrates that appraisal analysis is an effective means to get access to sentencing, which seemed so inaccessible to academic research.","PeriodicalId":46455,"journal":{"name":"Text & Talk","volume":"43 1","pages":"449 - 469"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8000,"publicationDate":"2022-08-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"1","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Text & Talk","FirstCategoryId":"98","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1515/text-2020-0228","RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q3","JCRName":"COMMUNICATION","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 1
Abstract
Abstract This study examines judges’ language use in sentencing remarks in the Crown Courts of England and Wales. Six sentencing remarks were selected from all those available on the UK judiciary website (by October 2016). The cases selected for closer analysis are as similar to each other as possible, so as to ensure that the differences in the discursive features of the sentencing remarks largely reflect the differences in judges’ sentencing practices. It is found that judges selectively use an appraisal strategy – using moralised purposes to invoke judgements of offenders or their behaviour – across the six sentencing remarks. Judges’ use (or non-use) of the appraisal strategy is found to be correlating with their sentencing decisions: i.e., judges opt for the appraisal strategy when their sentencing decisions are below or further above the starting point, but not when the decisions are just a few years above the starting point. The finding reveals that the statutory starting point exercises a binding effect on the judges’ sentencing practices despite the judges having the discretion to disregard the starting point. Such a finding not only provides an insight into the judges’ sentencing practices, but also demonstrates that appraisal analysis is an effective means to get access to sentencing, which seemed so inaccessible to academic research.
期刊介绍:
Text & Talk (founded as TEXT in 1981) is an internationally recognized forum for interdisciplinary research in language, discourse, and communication studies, focusing, among other things, on the situational and historical nature of text/talk production; the cognitive and sociocultural processes of language practice/action; and participant-based structures of meaning negotiation and multimodal alignment. Text & Talk encourages critical debates on these and other relevant issues, spanning not only the theoretical and methodological dimensions of discourse but also their practical and socially relevant outcomes.