Abstract

The ILDILAW project – Implicit Linguistic Devices in Italian Law investigates the role of implicit communication in party submissions, with the aim of understanding how presuppositions, implicatures and vagueness contribute to the construction of argumentation and persuasion in legal discourse. The underlying hypothesis is that the implicit may allow content to be conveyed without subjecting it fully to the recipient’s critical evaluation, and is therefore of particular relevance in texts, such as legal documents, characterised by a strong persuasive purpose. 

In particular, the project distinguishes between bona fide implications – which serve the economy of communication and relate to shared or uncontroversial information – and non-bona fide implications, through which unfounded, questionable, exaggerated or argumentatively weak content may be presented indirectly. The research is based on the LISP Corpus (Implicit Linguistic Devices in Italian Court Proceedings), a specialised corpus comprising 40 pseudonymised defence briefs, totalling over 260,000 tokens, selected from various areas of law. 

The texts undergo multi-level annotation that progressively examines presuppositions, vagueness and implicatures, classifying their subtypes and pragmatic-argumentative functions. Particular attention is also paid to the possible link between implicit communication and stereotypical representations relating to socially sensitive categories. The manual annotation, carried out according to a shared protocol and verified through inter-rater agreement measures, is complemented by the testing of artificial intelligence models within a human-in-the-loop framework. 

The data obtained will ultimately be used to develop an implicitness index, designed to measure and compare the use of implicit communication in legal discourse and other text types. The project thus aims to contribute both to the linguistic-pragmatic description of legal writing and to the promotion of more conscious, transparent and fair communication practices within the justice system.