Band 9, Heft 1

As digital technology prevails in crimes, academic insights have expanded to diverse issues related to cybercrimes both in China and abroad. Various jurisdictions have made efforts to get cybercrime under control, in particular, fighting against the misuse of emerging technologies in cybercrimes. In the context of cross-border cybercrime, putting one region’s criminal growth down could not live without cross-border or cross-sector cooperation. With such understanding, this paper aims to conduct a comparative study of cross-border cybercrime publications to see the research trends from the divergence and convergence of academic studies inside and outside China. Specifically, using CiteSpace (6.2.R6), this study presents an extensive bibliometric analysis of cross-border cybercrime research published during the past three decades in Web of Science Core Collections and China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI). The findings indicate the typical features of publications in different phases. Among others, the keywords analysis including cluster mapping and strongest burst reveals the research trend, which indicates that cross-border cybercrime is featured as possessing a complete industrial chain of online black market, with increasing application of high-tech tools and more connection with illicit financial flow. This study also examines barriers and touches upon the implications in the efficient fight against cross-border cybercrime, as well as the existing approaches like public-private partnership, mutual legal assistance and police cooperation, and global pathways to reducing conflicts among jurisdictions.

Repair is an integral part of every natural human discursive practice due to cognitive anxiety, stress, emotional valence, inability to recover words from one’s mental lexicon, slip of the tongue, among others. This study examined repair in Ghanaian judicial interactions using authentic judicial discourse data and working within the theoretical frameworks of conversational analysis and language and power. Results indicate that repairables include word search, correction proper and misstatements. Repair types included self-initiated self-repair, other-initiated other-repair, other-initiated self-repair, and other-initiated other-repair and self-repair. Linguistic and discourse-pragmatic strategies employed in initiating and carrying out repair include, pauses, sound prolongation, word/expression repetition, and morpho-syntactic and discourse-pragmatic features like yes-no questions, wh-questions , quantifiers, adjectives denoting exactness, pronouns, laughter, supportives, scolding via pejorative utterances, politeness/address forms, and calling on actors to abide by the courts’ moral code. In sum, repair is important on issues relating to understandability and interpretability of what judicial participants say, acceptable modes communication and their impact on facts needed to make cases judicable. Stakeholders in Ghanaian judicial practice and Ghanaian jurisprudence must take note of repair’s un-expendable nature in Ghanaian judicial discourse.

Released on Netflix, the most popular algorithm-oriented streaming service, The Social Dilemma ( TSD ) is a vivid manifestation of how the recent advancements in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Algorithms ( MLA s) have turned both to new species of post-digital, semio-cognitive power. Premised on the conception of MLA s as non-human intermediaries, this research endeavor proposes a novel post-digital ethnography of technologically-mediated algorithmic contexts and takes the challenge of examining MLA s as distributed, contested, and unbounded figures in the filmic narrative of this Netflix production. For the purpose, the paper employs post-digital cognitive-stylistic analytical tools, geared by van Leeuwen’s (de)-legitimation strategies, to showcase how MLA s, as socio-technical actors, are semio-cognitively materialized through spatio-temporal, narrative-immersive de-legitimating patterns. The examination of algorithms as socio-technical imaginary agents fully integrated within sociotechnical assemblages yields insightful findings. Delving deep into the multiple “posts” in the post-digital milieu of the film, the analysis affords valuable results that reframe, rename, and de-legitimate MLA s’ performative agency that is not only procedural-computational, but is socio-technical, semio-discursive, and cognitive-stylistic as well.

This paper proposes a novel approach to analysing the text organization of legal texts, specifically focusing on discourse patterning and recursion in the context of EU case law. The study investigates the discourse organization of the judgments of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) by exploring, in a data-driven analysis, the use of multiword expressions that occur with specific colligation properties. One peculiarity of CJEU judgments is that their structure is not readily visible since headings are unsystematically used. The application of the present approach demonstrated that discourse organization can be revealed in terms of discourse patterns, signalling devices, and by exploring the position of linguistic expressions in the text. The findings not only reveal concealed text organization units in CJEU judgments but also offer a methodological model for similar analyses in other legal and non-legal texts. The proposed model suggests an investigation of the interaction between metadiscourse (IMD), discourse patterns (DPD), and textual colligation, positing that when IMD and DPD exhibit textual colligation, they signal discourse patterning. This proposal connects two levels of text organization through textual correlation. The study further explores relations between discourse patterns in terms of the notion of recursion.

The study investigates grammatical means of marking stance in Nigerian Supreme Court lead judgements. Specifically, it examines the frequency, form and stance functions of that -complement clauses in lead judgements using Du Bios’ stance triangle model (Du Bois, John. 2007. The stance triangle. In Englebretson Robert (ed.), Stancetaking in discourse: Subjectivity, evaluation, interaction , 139–177. Amsterdam: John Benjamins) and Biber’s (Biber, Douglas. 2006. University language: A corpus-based study of spoken and written registers . Amsterdam: John Benjamins) semantic domains of verbal and adjectival predicates controlling that -complement clauses. The study shows that that -complement clauses in the lead judgements are predominantly verb-based and they mainly signal epistemic and few alignment stances. Verb-based that -clauses are largely indexed by communication verbs which report prior stances, present the lead judges’ arguments and validate them. Adjective-based that -clauses signal evaluative and few affective stances. They are frequently signalled by certainty adjectives which express lead judges’ certitude on the issues argued. That -complement clauses signal few alignment stances and yet fewer affective ones, possibly due to judges’ need to assert their authoritative voice as experts in the discourse community. The frequency of certainty verbs and adjectives in the that -complement clauses underscores the centrality of certitude in judicial argumentation. I suggest that judgements are not only evaluative as has been noted in earlier studies but also epistemic based on the predominance of epistemic and certainty markers lexico-grammatically realised and indexed by verb and adjective based that -clauses.

Based on relevance theory (RT), this study proposes translation by explicature (TE) as an approach for translating Sharia law texts. It recommends explicating such texts through various pragmatic processes, including saturation, disambiguation, reference resolution, and free enrichment. TE advises translators to approach the text interpretively, emphasizing its conceptual and procedural aspects, selecting elements based on the source text’s legal effect, and organizing the translation in accordance with the text’s purpose and legal impact. The study asserts that the selection of ST elements should adhere to the principle of relevance and be evaluated by establishing a context similar to that of the source text, while considering the principles of maximum cognitive effect and minimized processing effort for adequacy and validity.

This study examines a judicial opinion from an appellate court in the District of Columbia, in the United States, using membership categorization analysis. The appeal concerned the absence of an interpreter during the police interrogation of a person suspected of having committed a crime, and whether this absence violated a local law about the provision of interpreters. Deciding this appeal required the court to determine whether the defendant had met a statutory definition of “communication-impaired” persons who are entitled to interpretation services. I argue that, in determining whether the defendant fit into this legal category, the court discursively constructed two linguistic categories that helped support its ultimate disposition of the appeal. These linguistic categories were hierarchically positioned, with English speakers as a default and non-English speakers as somehow deficient or unable to fully function in society. The court’s opinion also contemplated a binary choice of a person being able to communicate in English fully, or not at all, with the possibility that a person might be proficient in English for some purposes, but not others, often presented as a concession or ancillary point. Taken as a whole, the category construction in the opinion suggests an ideology of English monolingualism, which belies a reality of multilingualism, code-shifting, and mixed linguistic identities.