The Criminal Judgment as a Genre Structure, Voices and Speech Acts in Swedish Judgments

Abstract

Criminal judgments are structurally complex texts that must account for a number of voices with opposite perspectives, while maintaining a high readability and understanding of the district court's judgments and decisions. This article aims to highlight the structure of criminal judgments and show how voices and speech acts constructs the structure. The study departs from a socio-rhetorical genre tradition where genres are seen as communicative tools for the achievement of goals. Forty-two judgments, which fall under the category of crime against the person in the Swedish Criminal Code, are analyzed based on the concepts of speech acts, theme and voice in order to distinguish which moves constructs the genre. The analysis shows that criminal judgments are constructed with six different moves that generate three different types of writing techniques depending on how the moves are arranged.