Negotiating judicial disagreement: the discursive functions of respect in Nigerian supreme court judgments

Abstract This study investigates the functions respect , respectful and respectfully in Nigerian Supreme Court lead and dissenting judgments, to explore the contextual nuances of the conventional politeness markers in written appellate adjudication. Drawing on a corpus of 122 judgments, the study examines the frequency, formal realisations, patterns of use and pragmatic functions of these forms across lead and dissenting judgments. The findings show that respect and its two other variants occur more frequently in dissenting judgments, although their distribution varies across individual dissents. The prepositional phrase, with respect , is the most frequent formal pattern in both genres. Across contexts involving agreement or disagreement with lower court judges, fellow judges, and litigants’ counsel, the forms serve as resources for mitigating face threat, framing aggravated disagreement and marking judicial identity. The study argues that respect , respectful and respectfully are not merely conventional markers of deference; rather, their pragmatic functions emerge from the interaction between linguistic form, discourse context, institutional relationships and the argumentative activity in which they occur.