CorCass and CorCos: The Corpora of the Italian Supreme Court and Constitutional Court

Abstract

The language of supreme court justices has long been analysed in the literature because of the socio-political values it carries. This paper is aimed at contributing to the current research by presenting two corpora of supreme court judgements: CorCass and CorCos. The former contains the judgments of the Italian Corte di Cassazione (“Court of Cassation”) collected between 2023 and 2025; the latter features the judgments of the Italian Corte Costituzionale (“Constitutional Court”) in the same time frame. To showcase the epistemic usefulness and applicability of such corpus materials in linguistics, legilinguistics and semiotics, this paper carries out a host of corpus linguistic analyses. Amongst these, high-frequency words, keyness, collocations, and n-grams are addressed, thus unveiling the language strategies adopted by the courts.