Opinions of Counsel: An Exploratory Survey of Generic Features

Two themes run through this paper. Firstly, I shall emphasize the importance of identifying the communicative purpose underlying barristers’ Opinions, which exemplify written discourse as genre and social practice (Bhatia 2004) in professional rather than academic domains. Secondly, I shall give a descriptive analysis of information encoded in this written genre in terms of its linguistic forms and content, by relying on the quantitative and qualitative data emerging from a corpus of seven anonymised Opinions provided by barristers from Lincoln’s Inn in London. The analysis will focus on their rhetorical and textual structures (Moves), underlying the relevant communicative purpose and the interpersonal function as realized by the tenor and the modality patterns, the latter enacting epistemic meanings expressed by modal verbs and other lexical items in epistemic use. The paper shows that epistemic modality meanings in hedging use (Coates 1983) interacting with other forms of hedging devices (Hyland 1998) are important features for the writers to express their degree of commitment to the proposition made in various