With Due Force: A Corpus‑Based Study of Boosters in Supreme Court Judgements

This study investigates the rhetorical function of adjectives and adverbs as boosters in dissenting opinions issued by judges of the Supreme Court of the United States. It focuses on the linguistic strategies through which dissenting judges assert their individual stance, engage critically with the majority’s reasoning and position themselves within the broader institutional discourse of the Court. Drawing on an ad hoc corpus comprising 934,370 tokens from dissenting opinions delivered between 2021 and 2025, the analysis employs corpus linguistic tools, including TagAnt and AntConc, to identify and categorise lexical items that intensify evaluative meaning. Boosters are examined in terms of their pragmatic function, with five primary categories emerging, namely, Criticising (C), Emphasising (E), Hedging (H), Stance (S) and Shared Values (SV). These categories reveal how lexical choices signal varying degrees of alignment, resistance and persuasion. Particular attention is paid to multi-word expressions or n-grams, specifically adverb-adjective and adverb-adverb combinations, through which judges construct nuanced evaluative meanings and reinforce rhetorical force. The study shows how these lexico-grammatical patterns contribute to the construction of judicial authority, the negotiation of institutional identity and the performative aspects of dissent. By foregrounding the role of linguistic intensification, the research contributes to a richer understanding of dissent as a site of rhetorical agency within legal discourse.