Estrategias retóricas de persuasión en Blogs Jurídicos (Blawgs) y Artículos Doctrinales

Ricardo-María Jiménez-Yáñez; Diana Giner Alonso; Pablo Franquet Elía

doi:10.14198/dissoc.14.2.5

Authors

Ricardo-María Jiménez-Yáñez Universidad Internacional de Cataluña, Spain https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8065-1289
Diana Giner Alonso Universidad San Jorge, Spain https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9330-2902
Pablo Franquet Elía Despacho Fieldfisher-Jausàs, Spain

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.14198/dissoc.14.2.5

Keywords:

Legal blogs (blawgs), Discourse analysis, Legal Spanish, Floor clauses, Corpus Linguistics, persuasion

Abstract

Legal blogs analyse and comment professional or even personally legal decisions that also critique the national or international legal system where they take place. On the other hand, scholarly legal articles offer a more exhaustive research work performed by academics in the legal field. The present paper seeks to explore and compare the authors’ stance in a corpus of legal blogs (blawgs) and scholarly legal articles with reference to a polemic Spanish judgment from 2016 on “floor clauses” in mortgage loans. It will examine the construction of the authors’ stance as institutional figures in the legal field, who express their opinion in public digital genres such as legal blogs (blawgs) and also the response from other authors, also legal professionals, in scholarly legal articles. Therefore, attention will be paid to the intensifiers, hedges and attitudinal markers employed in these two legal genres with the objective of persuading their audience of their view as professionals and experts in the field. With this aim in mind, this paper will make use of a blended classification of rhetorical strategies of persuasion inspired by some of the categories developed by the concept of metadiscourse (Vande Kopple, 1985; Crismore, 1983; Crismore y otros, 1993; Dafouz, 2003; Hyland, 2005) and the Appraisal Theory (Martin & White, 2005) in an exploratory analysis of the two genres. In particular, hedges, boosters and attitudinal markers will be explored a corpus of ten blawg entries and ten scholarly legal articles. In addition to this, some techniques of corpus linguistics wil be used within the field of Corpus Assisted Discourse Studies. It should be noted that a balanced use of these strategies is perceived both in the blawg entries and the scholarly legal articles. However, there is a clear more recurrent use of attitudinal markers in the latter.

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