The expression of emotion in institutionalized legal opinion: a contrastive spanish-english pre-translational study

Abstract

The present work carries out a contrastive study of interpersonal devices between two corpora of legal opinion in English and Spanish, with a view to assessing the different use that is made in these languages of the indicators of emotion, evaluation and appreciation as to the ideational context of these texts. The antecedents of the present study are found in the Appraisal theory, which constitutes the interpretation of Halliday’s (1994/2004) Systemic-Functional Linguistics by the Sydney School. Through the analysis of an ad-hoc corpus of forty opinion columns from two prestigious and influential newspapers, El Pais and The New York Times, aims to understand how the use of the different evaluation resources advocated by Appraisal theory (Affect, Judgment and Appreciation) varies depending on the way legal opinion articles as genres are conceived in the languages and cultures under scrutiny. In other words, it tries to deepen into the different application of the prototypical rhetorical strategies used to express emotion and evaluation, through which the different ideological positions of the institutionalized press are naturalized