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The influence of legal tradition on Italian arbitration discourse

Abstract In the last few decades, arbitration has been increasingly adopted in trade and commerce to resolve conflicts. As this method of settling commercial disputes is commonly considered an efficient, economical and effective alternative to litigation, the language used in arbitration documents is usually deemed to differ from that of litigation texts. However, in recent years there has been a narrowing between the two practices, as litigation processes and procedures have increasingly been seen to influence arbitration practices. In view of these considerations, the paper investigates the nature and the extent of the “colonization” of commercial arbitration discourse by litigation language in the Italian context, and explores the motivations for such an interdiscursive process. To better understand how and to what extent language forms/functions correlate to the “colonization” of arbitration discourse, the paper focuses on the lexico-semantic elements of the Italian arbitration texts examined here and on the linguistic expression of their rhetorical-pragmatic strategies. In particular, it examines whether key linguistic features of Italian legal language are also present in the texts taken into consideration. The analysis is based on the recording of recent Italian arbitral proceedings as well as awards of commercial arbitration cases, and also examines documents used in Online Dispute Resolution, a field which is supposed to be more user-friendly and accessible to laymen wishing for clear resolutions to resolve their disputes. Relying on the analysis of the texts, the chapter shows the presence of the main lexical, syntactic and textual patterns typical of Italian legal language. The presence of these features can be explained not only by the legal background of many of the arbitrators but also by a process of standardization which seems to condition also the non-legal experts working in this field.