Deonticity and Authoritativeness in Hong Kong International Arbitration Awards

This chapter investigates the linguistic, rhetorical and pragmatic features of arbitral awards drafted in English by the Hong Kong International Arbitration Centre (HKIAC), with a specific focus on those resources which are meant to enhance deonticity and authoritativeness, and, ultimately, to make arbitration discourse readable as a normative type of communication (Nariman 2000, Bhatia et al. 2003). Our aim is to discover whether and through what linguistic resources experts try (and manage) to limit as much as possible the risk of challenge. Based on a corpus of 78 arbitral awards (available on the HKIAC site at <www.hklii.hk/eng/>, last accessed on 7 January 2015) this chapter seeks to investigate the arbitrators’ linguistic and rhetorical choices found in the final section of such texts, the Decision section − where the actual arbitral pronouncement is expressed − with a specific focus on the metadiscursive resources employed to boost authoritativeness and to enhance the legal validity of the decision. For this purpose, specific emphasis will be placed on attributive resources, i.e. the terms which are employed to represent the arbitrator (which may vary in terms of personalization and preciseness/vagueness) on the one hand, and on deonticity markers, i.e. the verbs and verbal construction used to codify the arbitral decision, on the other.