Interrogative Engagement as a Pragmatic and Textual Function in Legal Studies

This chapter investigates the use of interrogative sentences in legal studies, a domain where persuasion does not benefit from corpus-based evidence but is an eminently discourse-based construct. Questions are particularly strategic tools to align readers to the writer’s point of view and guide interpretation, since they can be employed to both organize the argumentation and anticipate problematic aspects or doubts with the purpose to neutralize them. Based on a corpus of 90 legal research articles taken from CADIS, this chapter examines questions according to their pragmatic and textual aspect, and assesses their specificity to the legal domain by comparing their frequency and function with a reference corpus of 270 research articles in other academic domains (applied linguistics, economics and medicine).