In spite of being popularly regarded as examples of objectivity, two collections of Spanish and British judicial decisions related to the search terms migration, immigration and their Spanish equivalents were examined in search for evidence of the use of evaluative vocabulary, which appears to be considerably significant judging by the amount of such lexical items found in both corpora. This research thus introduces a contrastive corpus-based study of two legal corpora through the replication of the appraisal theory model. The frequency lists from both corpora, obtained using the software Lancsbox (Brezina et al., 2015) were compared by examining and classifying those vocabulary items amongst the top 2,500 types in the lists using the taxonomy provided by appraisal theory. The findings show that the British dataset contains a greater proportion of evaluative vocabulary, particularly as regards the category affect within the appraisal system. Such findings could be related to the very nature of its legal system, where the law is said to be judge-made, leaving greater freedom for the expression of stance as opposed to the Spanish system, which is codified and may somehow constrain legal actors in the way in which they convey their attitude towards the propositional content of legal texts.

中文翻译：

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探索法律话语中的意外：基于语料库的西班牙和英国移民判决的对比分析

尽管通常被认为是客观性的例子，但还是对与移民，移民及其西班牙语等效词等搜索词有关的两个西班牙和英国司法判决集合进行了研究，以寻找使用评估词汇的证据，这似乎具有重要意义。根据在两个语料库中发现的此类词汇项的数量来判断。因此，本研究通过评估理论模型的复制，引入了基于对比语料库的两个法律语料库的研究。使用评估理论提供的分类法，通过检查和分类列表中排名前2500种类型的词汇，比较了使用Lancsbox软件（Brezina等人，2015年）获得的两种语料的频率列表。调查结果表明，英国数据集包含较大比例的评估词汇，尤其是在评估系统中影响类别的方面。这些发现可能与其法律制度的本质有关，据说法律是由法官制定的，与西班牙法律制度相比，留有更大的表达立场自由，而西班牙法律制度已编纂，并可能以某种方式限制法律行为者。他们表达对法律文本的主张内容的态度的方式。