The present paper stems from a contrastive corpus-based study of phraseology in Spanish, Italian and English criminal judgments (Pontrandolfo 2013). By exploring the Corpus of Criminal Judgments (COSPE), a large comparable trilingual corpus (Spanish, Italian, English) of approximately 6 million words, the present paper aims at investigating the close relationship among specialised discourse, discourse markers and translation.
The focus of the study is on special particles which play a pivotal role in judicial texts: “contrargumentative markers” (Portolés 1998, Montolío 2001) or “antioriented argumentative markers” (Escandell 2013), which, following Rudolph (1996) have been labeled “argumentative markers of contrast”.
The primary objective of the paper is to carry out a quantitative analysis of the distribution of this type of discourse markers in COSPE, as well as a qualitative analysis aimed at characterising the markers uses in COSPE and identifying trends of use in judicial discourse. The secondary objective, which nevertheless guides the whole study, is to carry out a legal translation-oriented analysis. Indeed, studying discourse markers is a necessary precondition for translators, since the semantic and pragmatic relations conveyed by these particles and their distributional differences represent the guidelines for the selection of adequate translation solutions (cf. Visconti 2000, Garofalo 2006).
From a methodological point of view, the study combines a qualitative approach oriented at the discourse genre (cf. Bhatia 1993, Garofalo 2009) with a more qualiquantitative approach based on corpus linguistics, more specifi cally on corpus-assisted discourse studies (Partington 2004, Partington et al. 2013).
