📖 ABSTRACT/OVERVIEW
This study presents a corpus-based genre analysis of hedging in Nigerian Supreme Court judgements published between 2015 and 2024, making an original contribution to the forensic and legal linguistics literature on judicial discourse in postcolonial common law jurisdictions. Hedging in legal discourse is a strategically significant phenomenon through which judges calibrate epistemic commitment, manage precedential obligations, and navigate politically sensitive interpretive decisions, yet its systematic corpus-based analysis in Nigerian judgements has not been undertaken. The research constructs a 1-million-token corpus of 150 Supreme Court judgements distributed across constitutional, criminal, and civil matter categories. The corpus is annotated and analysed using a multi-feature hedging taxonomy covering modal verbs, adverbial hedges, approximators, shield constructions, and attributed hedges drawn from existing legal discourse frameworks extended to the Nigerian context. Analysis further examines hedging variation across judgement sections, matter types, and individual judicial styles. Findings document a distinctive Nigerian Supreme Court hedging grammar in which attributed hedges through prior judgement citation are the most frequent hedging strategy, reflecting the common law precedent system, while modal hedges show matter-type sensitivity with constitutional cases exhibiting significantly lower hedging density than civil matters. Individual judicial style variation in hedging density is documented as substantial, with implications for the analysis of judicial reasoning quality. The study provides an original benchmark for Nigerian legal discourse analysis and contributes to the global genre analysis of judicial writing. Keywords: hedging, legal discourse, Supreme Court, corpus linguistics, judicial genre.
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