Analyse de l’organisation énonciative des arrêts de la Cour de justice et du Tribunal de Première Instance des communautés européennes

Abstract

This paper will consider the enunciative organisation of the judgments rendered by the Court of Justice and the Court of First Instance of the European Communities. An exam of a corpus of 43 judgments pronounced during the first half of the 2002 by the European jurisdictions will be held in order to find out the peculiarities of juridical French in the European Community. The study of deictic words concerning the hic et nunc of the text shows the recurrence of a non-actual enunciation (obtained by the use of the non personne, following the definition given by Benveniste) where the speaking subject is deleted, even if he produces a message of authority to whom obedience is compulsory (for this reason the judge must not apologize for the “Face Threatening Acts” he utters towards the positive and negative faces of the parties to the case). The search of enunciative instances aims at finding out the consequences brought by the non-actual enunciation at a level of morpho-syntactic choices. The analysis of the discursive voices of the judgment shows an evident dialogic structure which includes all the forms of the indirect speech, from the hétérogénéité montrée (quotation in inverted commas drawn from Law Codes and previous judgments) to the polyphony implied by the structure: Thesis (applicant) / Antithesis (defendant) / Conclusion (Court of Justice or Court of First Instance), where several voices are mingled. A remark on the possible didactic consequences will form the last part of this paper: considering a public composed by Italian speaking students matriculated to a Faculty of Law, we will concentrate our attention on the development of the competences related to the more frequent structures.

Keywords

• énonciation
• français juridique
• politesse linguistique
• polyphonie
• déixis