INSTITUTIONAL POWER IN U.S. SUPREME COURT ORAL ARGUMENTS: A CORPUS-ASSISTED CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

Abstract

Courtroom interaction is a highly institutionalized form of discourse in which language functions as a key mechanism for exercising and maintaining power. This study examines how institutional authority is linguistically constructed in United States Supreme Court courtroom speech by employing a corpus-assisted Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) approach. The data for this study consist of an official oral argument transcript from Google LLC v. Oracle America, Inc., comprising approximately 15,364 words of spoken interaction between Supreme Court Justices and legal counsel. The corpus was systematically cleaned and manually tagged according to speaker roles and analyzed using AntConc to identify patterns of modality, questioning strategies, and lexical distribution. Quantitative corpus findings were subsequently interpreted through Fairclough’s three-dimensional model of CDA and van Dijk’s theory of institutional power. The analysis reveals that Supreme Court Justices frequently employ high-modality expressions and restrictive questioning strategies, while lawyers demonstrate relatively limited discursive control. This study contributes to forensic linguistics by demonstrating how corpus methods can strengthen CDA in the analysis of courtroom discourse and by providing empirical evidence of power asymmetries in judicial interaction.