Strategies For Argument Construction In International Commercial Arbitration: An Adaptation-Based Approach

This thesis offers a linguistic perspective upon the development of Argument in International commercial arbitration cases. Supported by Verschueren's Theory of Linguistic Adaptation (Verschueren: 1987, 1999), this author probes into the adaptive choices of linguistic and pragmatic strategies that the international lawyers frequently make in constructing their Arguments in the context of international commercial arbitration.A conceptual framework is constructed with an adaptation model that treats Argument production as a dynamic process of making linguistic choices. In the context of international commercial arbitration, driven by his communicative purposes of persuading the tribunal and seeking compromises from opposing parties, the lawyer constructs the Argument by making linguistic choices that are situated at different levels of linguistic structures, three of which are considered in the present study, namely, the discourse level, the syntax level and the lexical level. Choices of language, code and style are separately discussed. In the choice-making course, the lawyer generally makes adaptation to three contextual correlates, i.e. arbitral properties (e.g. negotiability); the values of the arbitrators represented by the legal systems they hail from and psychological motivations of the audience (actually the lawyer's assumption of his audiences' psychological motivations). After the consummation of adaptation and negotiation, there comes the lawyer's final product - persuasive ICA Argument, which is to be interpreted by the audience to act upon the Argument, and therefore the lawyer can realize most, if not all, of his communicative purposes.The present study is an attempt to supply a gap between the researches of ICA Argument from the legal perspective and argumentative discourses from the linguistic perspective. The findings will have some practical implications, for example, for arousing awareness of the importance of the art of advocacy in international commercial arbitration, and for inspiring the legal practitioners to apply some linguistic and pragmatic strategies to their professional work.