Escenarios heteroglósicos en las sentencias del Tribunal Supremo de España y del Tribunal de Justicia de la UE. El caso de los conectores conditionales complejos

This study deals with the different distribution of Complex Conditional Connectors (CCCs) in a monolingual comparable corpus made up of judicial rulings in Spanish delivered by two high courts, one Spanish (Tribunal Supremo de España, TSE) and one European (Court of Justice of the EU, CJEU). After observing the logic functions and the normalised frequency of such connectors in both subcorpora and in a comparison corpus of standard Spanish, the asymetric distribution of these conditional operators in the rulings of these two judicial authorities is highlighted. The Appraisal Theory is brought to bear in order to interpret the results, emphasizing that the Spanish and the European judges negotiate the interpersonal meaning of their rulings differently, through an idiosyncratic use of CCCs. In fact, both courts show dissimilar heteroglossic positioning, opening up or closing the argumentative space to possible dialogistic alternatives in a divergent way.