Assessing the Basic Law: A Discourse-Analytic Investigation of the Targeted Use of Evidentiality in the HKSAR Appellate Courts

One of the central questions of language scholarship concerns how ‘speakers [or writers] make meaning by making text’ (Mauranen and Sinclair, 2006: 8). The proposed study will examine a legally binding form of text, i.e., written judicial opinions. Specifically, the research will systematically investigate how judicial opinion writers interactively make certain kinds of meaning with the use of the discourse phenomenon known asevidentiality. Evidentiality is the discursive means by which communicators index the source and method of propositional content and comment upon the epistemological status of such content (Mushin, 2001: 18). Amongst other things, the examination of evidentiality in judicial opinion writing yields direct insight into the current status of the law.Whilst language scholars have significantly investigated certain forms of text (e.g., academic writing, journalism, and e-communication), judicial opinions are woefully under-investigated (McKeown, Accepted). This is surprising given the high-stakes nature of such writing. Via written judicial opinion, the legality of an action can be radically altered. Nowhere is this more apparent than in judicial opinions concerning theBasic Law of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China (hereafter the Basic Law). Using a multimillion word data set, the current project will examine the use of evidentiality in written judicial opinions concerning the Basic Law.In a first of its kind, this proposed study will make several principal contributions to the fields of language and legal scholarship. First, the project will uncover the interactive nature of a genre, i.e., judicial opinions, and discourse phenomenon, i.e., evidentiality, which to date have been treated as static constructs. Indeed, the proposed study proceeds on the basis that both judicial opinions and evidential markers respond to, and build upon, the discourse of other communicators. Secondly, legal discourse studies have tended to look at one level of a given court system (e.g., the U.S. Supreme Court). The proposed research will examine the interaction between the appellate courts of the HKSAR (i.e., the Court of Appeal and the Court of Final Appeal). Thirdly, in line with broader trends in which discourse concepts have enriched the understanding of social phenomena (Thomas, 2003: 776), the application of a discourse-analytic approach will enrich the Basic Law jurisprudential literature. It will do this by identifying the kinds ofevidentiality assessments that have been expressed in relation to different aspects of Basic Law judicial discourse and how these have changed over time.