This paper investigates what are known as “double” or “multiple negatives” in legal
texts drafted in three European languages: Castilian Spanish, British English
and the varieties of Italian used in both Italian and Swiss Courts. For the purpose
of our study, corpora of Court judgments and control corpora comprising newspaper
articles were compiled for all three of the languages under scrutiny. The
data obtained from the survey show that the English and Spanish texts make a
more frequent use of negatives in general and of multiple negatives in particular
in court judgments than in newspaper articles. In contrast, the Italian corpus
seems to behave differently: negative items are more numerous in newspapers
than in Italian and Swiss court judgments, even though the frequency of “non”
before nouns, adjectives, adverbs and negative prefixes is greater in the legal
texts. However, it should be stressed that, regardless of the language, constructs
involving more items classified as negatives from a strictly morphological viewpoint
never add up to a significant share of the subcorpora. Furthermore, our
study stresses the difficulties emerging in the very definition of “multiple negatives”,
with the ensuing problems in the identification of semantically equivalent affirmative constructs. Finally, it should be noted that this research has only
considered double and multiple negatives that are made explicit through the use
of morphological markers, while the combination of those markers with lexical
items having a negative meaning has been overlooked.
