Abstract
This paper is an attempt to describe generic structures of two legal texts in the light of
social ideologies that functionally motivate the producers of the texts to write them the
way they are written. The selected texts are: 1) a legal judgment of the US Supreme
Court produced by Justice Rehnquist, the former chief justice of the United States
Supreme Court in a famous case Jennifer Gratz and Patrick Hamacher V. Lee Bolinger
et al., and 2) a newspaper report of the same judgment published in The Washington
Post. As a genre analyst, my concern when confronted with these two texts is to describe
and explain how both the texts are alike and how they differ in terms of generic
structures and social and institutional influences. The findings reveal that the writers of
two texts communicate the same message in two strikingly different ways as the
differences between the texts are more marked than their similarities due to the
producers’ communicative intent: The judge’s communicative intent is to persuade the
specialized audience, whereas the newspaper reporter informs and instructs the general
public. In non-technical terms, the legal judgment is heavier or more formal, more
technical, and more detailed than the newspaper report which sounds more accessible
and opinionated. Differences found in terms of generic structures are related to 1)
number of stages 2) sequencing and prioritizing of stages 3) content of stages 4)
institutional conventions in stages and, 5) professional skills in stages. The findings
have valuable pedagogical significance.
Naveed Ahmad. (2014) EFFECTS OF IDEOLOGICAL MOTIVATIONS ON GENERIC STRUCTURES OF THE SAME MESSAGE TEXTS: A COMPARATIVE GENRE ANALYSIS OF A LEGAL JUDGMENT AND A NEWSPAPER REPORT, Journal of Social Science and Humanities, Volume 53, Issue 2.
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