Now in the historical courtroom
Users and functions
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.
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
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Cited by
Cited by 3 other publications
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
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