Indicators of argumentation in arbitration awards : a diachronic perspective

This paper investigates the international arbitration award from the perspective of genre hybridization, with a view to verifying the claim that boundaries in the discursive practices of arbitration and litigation have been progressively blurring, as an effect of ‘colonization’ of the former on the part of the latter. Starting from the assumption that recourse to argumentation is a distinguishing feature of litigative discourse, and particularly of the judgement, where the court needs to justify their decision, this paper focuses on the incidence of indicators of argumentation in a corpus of arbitration awards spanning over two decades, aiming to ascertain whether their use has increased over time. The quantitative analysis is integrated with close reading of selected texts, relying on the categories of Werlich’s text grammar (1983), in order to support the quantitative findings with insights at the lexico-grammatical and textual level. The analysis shows a marked increase in the recourse to argumentative strategies over time, thus providing evidence of the increasing influence of litigation on arbitration.