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Article published In:
Dialogues in Diachrony: Celebrating Historical Corpora of Speech-related Texts
Edited by Merja Kytö and Terry Walker
[Journal of Historical Pragmatics 19:2] 2018
► pp. 223–242

Now in the historical courtroom

Users and functions

| University of Augsburg
The investigation of the pragmatic marker now in trial proceedings from 1560 to 1800 shows a genre-specific usage profile with regard to its uses and functions. Courtroom “professionals” (lawyers, judges and other officials) use now significantly more frequently than lay speakers (witnesses, victims and defendants). The former use it to segment and highlight stages in the argumentation, as well as to control and to disalign with others’ interactive behaviour. Self-defending litigants share these functional preferences to some extent, while all other lay persons use now for structuring their answers and dominantly in direct-speech contexts. Now in professional legal speech thus functions as a strategic metapragmatic framing strategy.
Keywords: argumentation, conversational control, disalignment, framing, legal language, pragmatic marker
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The uses of now
  • 3.Pragmatic markers in the courtroom
  • 4.Data
  • 5.Results
    • 5.1Frequencies, functions and users of now
    • 5.2Judges and lawyers
    • 5.3Lay interactants
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 1 February 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jhp.00020.cla
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Leitner, Magdalena & Andreas H. Jucker
2021. Historical Sociopragmatics. In The Cambridge Handbook of Sociopragmatics, ► pp. 687 ff. DOI logo
CLARIDGE, CLAUDIA, EWA JONSSON & MERJA KYTÖ
2020. Entirely innocent: a historical sociopragmatic analysis of maximizers in theOld Bailey Corpus. English Language and Linguistics 24:4 ► pp. 855 ff. DOI logo
[no author supplied]
2021. Approaches and Methods in Sociopragmatics. In The Cambridge Handbook of Sociopragmatics, ► pp. 567 ff. DOI logo

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