Argumentative Features in Legal Discourse on Copyright Disputes in Vietnam

This article investigates argumentative features in legal discourse on copyright disputes in Vietnam from a legal-linguistic perspective. Copyright disputes are not only legal conflicts over authorship, ownership, permitted use, infringement, and compensation; they are also discursive events in which different actors construct, challenge, and evaluate claims through language. Using qualitative discourse analysis, argumentation analysis, and legal-linguistic textual analysis, the study examines the typical argumentative organization found in statutes, pleadings, written submissions, expert materials, and judicial reasoning concerning copyright disputes. The findings show that legal discourse in this field is characterized by a strong dependence on statutory authority, a highly intertextual structure, a recurrent sequence of claim, legal ground, evidentiary ground, inference, and conclusion, and a frequent combination of legal, evidentiary, comparative, contractual, damage-based, and exception-based arguments. At the linguistic level, the discourse relies on specialized legal terminology, deontic modality, logical connectors, citation formulas, impersonal constructions, and evaluative expressions such as 'there are grounds to determine' or 'there is no sufficient basis to accept'. The study also shows that plaintiffs, defendants, and adjudicating bodies employ different argumentative strategies: plaintiffs tend to affirm rights and prove infringement; defendants tend to deny, distinguish, or justify the contested use; and adjudicating bodies tend to neutralize competing claims and transform them into authoritative legal conclusions. The article contributes to research on forensic linguistics and legal discourse in Vietnam and suggests that the study of argumentation can improve the drafting, interpretation, and evaluation of legal texts in copyright disputes.