Generic Structure Potential of the Adjudicatory Proceedings of Juvenile Court in South-west Nigeria

Abstract

The juvenile court is a legal institution where children that are offenders or neglected are arraigned 
for trial or supervision. Generic Structure Potential (GSP), a perspective developed by Halliday and 
Hassan (1989) accounts for the thematic activities of such institutions. GSP is a contextual analysis 
that discusses the components of texts and sequence of discourse in interactions. Extant studies on 
thematic activities of institutions have focused on GSP of the essays, newspaper entries, editorials, 
shop interactions, classroom interactions and wedding proceedings. These works serve as the basis 
for proposing generic prototypical patterns and generic classifications of discursive events. 
Adjudicatory proceedings involve issues related to children in the Nigerian context. The contextual 
study of the prototypical pattern of adjudicatory proceedings from GSP’s perspective which sparsely 
exists in literature is the gap this paper aims to fill. This study employs three selected juvenile courts 
in South-West Nigeria to explore the contextual situation and interactional structure of the 
proceedings. This paper is able to predict the nature of adjudicatory proceedings, present obligatory 
structural elements as based on mutual assumption and demonstrate mitigation against politic 
behaviour through clarification utterances. The study contributes to a better understanding of juvenile 
court proceedings and provides insights into the delivery of justice to children.