The Supreme Court, being the highest deciding body that ends legal controversies, drafts decisions that eventually become part and parcel of the constitution that protects the rights of citizens. This paper examines the signals of concession in philippine and American Supreme court decisions, specifically focusing on argumentation in jurisprudence. Landmark cases on family relations were analyzed to describe how concession is articulated in decisions that debunk the ruling of lower courts. Moreover, this paper attempts to specify concessive preferences of Supreme Court judges that may somehow describe the standard discourse patterns in Philippine English and American English. The results of this study may be of significance and interest to filipino students of Legal English, lawyers practicing foreign and legal affairs, and researchers of Philippine English and American English.
Keywords: Concession, concessive signals, contrastive analysis, forensic linguistics, legal linguistics, Supreme Court decisionsBarth-Weingarten, D. (2003). Concession in spoken English: On the realization of a discourse pragmatic relation. Tubigen: Verlag.
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