Anaphoric Elements in Current Judgments: Participle-based Deverbal Adjectives

One of the main characteristics of legal-administrative texts, viewed from the perspective of language, is the abuse of words and expressions indicating that we are in the presence of something that has already appeared in the discourse, i.e., what are called anaphoric elements.

In the tradition of Spanish legal texts, of all the procedures implemented to mark anaphora, one element stands out: the participle dicho, frequently used as a demonstrative adjective.  In this paper, however, we will focus on other adjectives –all of them participle-derived– that were incorporated into the anaphoric marking system after dicho: citado, mencionado, referido, aludido, referenciado, señalado, etc.

On the one hand, we will offer the frequency indices and classification of these adjectives as a function of the syntactic contexts in which they appear in texts of current case law (the corpus is made up of 500 judgments from the first six months of 2013). On the other, we will propose the date from which these adjectives begin to compete with dicho to mark the anaphor in legal texts.