Using linguistic instruments this work sets out to give a transparent description of the text-supported and discourse-based legal dispute in the process of reaching a legal judgement. It examines a corpus of authentic texts originating from six related legal cases in Germany, identifying distinct speech act patterns and the specific action strategies and perspective-defining efforts that are used with them. With their help a model is developed for the analysis of this specialized communication process.

Jing Li, Foreign Studies University, Beijing, China.