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Article published In:
Journal of Historical Pragmatics
Vol. 24:2 (2023) ► pp.302–326

Repeated, imagined, hearsay

Representation of reported discourse in eighteenth-century legal testimony

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In this paper, I analyse the representation of reported discourse in testimony from a 1795 conspiracy trial. I present a framework for analysing scribal intervention in discourse reporting and show that, although the transcription conventions of historical criminal proceedings offer the appearance of being objective representations, recorded testimony privileges idealised representations of speech events. In fact, a special status is given to those speech events to which those in the courtroom were not privy, that is, hearsay. When scribes use Direct Discourse to report this type of speech, they are simultaneously marking it as evidence available for judicial decision-making and distancing themselves from the judgment and interpretation process. I show that this is particularly problematic for interpreted testimony. This has implications for both our understanding of historical courtroom processes and the use of trial transcripts for historical sociolinguistic and pragmatic analysis.

Keywords: courtroom discourse, French, Louisiana slave conspiracies, reported speech, scribal practices
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Discourse representation in the legal context
    • 2.1Faithfulness in transcription
    • 2.2Speakers and levels of Reported Discourse
  • 3.The Pointe Coupée conspiracy
  • 4.Reported discourse in the Pointe Coupée trial
    • 4.1Scribal choices: The frame
    • 4.2Scribal choices: The inset
  • 5.Linguistic varieties and multilingualism: Testing the limits of dd
  • 6.Discussion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Sources
  • References
Published online: 11 September 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jhp.20005.tho
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