“But I think, with respect, that the trial court was wrong”: but signalling stance in Nigerian Supreme Court Judgements

This study investigates the stance functions of but as a contrastive marker in Nigerian Supreme Court judgements to explore other lexical means of marking stances in the legal genre aside value-laden words and lexico-grammatical constructions. The study analysed a corpus of Nigerian Supreme Court judgements comprising lead, supporting and dissenting judgements for stance classification, following the stance triangle model. Findings show that the contrastive marker mostly signals epistemic, evidential, and evaluative stances, an indication that even with but the presentation of subjective positions in judicial opinions entails evaluation of other stance takers’ stances, assertive presentation of such positions alongside cogent evidence to justify and legitimise them. Alignment and affective positions are rarely signalled with but in the corpus, which implies that beyond any other communicative intents, projection of individual voice based on legal principles and facts is more important to the judge than expression of affect or alignment with others.