Évaluation et gradation dans une décision de la cour européenne des droits de l’homme

Abstract

Judicial decisions belong to a legal genre, case-law, which in French culture seems to be objective and impartial. However, although the speaker tries to hide his presence and subjectivity, he is expected to adopt a position and give a judgement. The aim of this paper is to examine how evaluation is conveyed in these legal documents and which are the linguistic mechanisms used by the speaker to do so. The text chosen for our approach is a judgement issued by the Third Section of the European Court of Human Rights (HUDOC): “Case Etxebarria Caballero v. Espagne” (7th October 2014). The applicant lodges an appeal to HUDOC in order to denounce a violation of Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which prevents the torture and ill-treatment of people in detention or in the custody of the police, by the Spanish authorities. In order to analyze evaluative mechanisms, Appraisal Theory (Martin and White, 2005) is applied to the corpus, as well as some conceptual tools taken from Point of View Semantics (Raccah, 2005).

Keywords

• semantics
• attitude
• point of view.
• European case-law
• appraisal
• gradation