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“…animated by a number of fundamental principles”

An analysis of pragmatic argumentation in a corpus of Supreme Court of Ireland’s judgments on human rights

ORCiD logo with link | University of Modena and Reggio Emilia
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Open Access publication of this article was funded through a Transformative Agreement with University of Modena and Reggio Emilia.

Published online: 12 February 2026
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https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.25057.maz
Abstract
The aim of this paper is to combine a quantitative analysis of indicators of pragmatic argumentation with a qualitative investigation of the argument scheme in a corpus of Supreme Court of Ireland’s judgments. The quantitative analysis indicates that the Supreme Court’s argumentation tends to support judicial standpoints by focusing on the negative impact of alternative lines of argument, whether from other judgments or the parties’ submissions. Alternatively, the argumentation draws the relevant audience’s attention to legal values and principles underlying legislation or the Constitution. The qualitative study of Heneghan v. Minister for Housing, furthermore, shows how the Court’s pragmatic argumentation combined its positive and negative variant, and responded to the relevant critical questions. Overall, the use of corpus-informed tools played a central role in the study of indicators of argumentation as “‘entry points” into the construction of judicial argumentation ( (2021). Corpus linguistics and legal discourse. International Journal for the Semiotics of Law, 341, 1515–1540. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar), which is fruitfully integrated with insights from argumentation theory.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Judicial discourse at the intersection of corpus work and argumentation
  • 3.Materials and methods
  • 4.Pragmatic argumentation in the Éir HR Corpus: An overview
    • 4.1“His submissions […] would, if correct, lead to a direct conflict…” — Collocational and phraseological patterns of lemmas
    • 4.2“…the construction which will achieve the smooth and harmonious operation of the Constitution” — A case study on pragmatic argumentation in Heneghan v. Minister for Housing
  • 5.Discussion and conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
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