Explicit and implicit discursive strategies and moral order in a
trial process
The present paper examines data which has been drawn from the
official proceedings of a murder trial in a Greek court, concerning the killing
of an adolescent by a police officer (see also Georgalidou 2012, 2016), and addresses the issues of aggressive discursive strategies
and the moral order in the trial process. It analyses the explicit and implicit
strategies involved in morally discrediting the opponent, a rather frequent
defence strategy (Atkinson and Drew
1979; Coulthard and Johnson
2007; Levinson 1979). The
paper examines agency deflection towards the victim (Georgalidou 2016), attribution of a socio-spatial
identity to the victim and witnesses in an essentialist and reductionist way,
and other linguistic and discursive means, the majority of which mobilize moral
panic and have implications for the moral order in court. I argue that these
aggressive discursive means primarily contribute to the construction of a
normative moral order by both adversarial parties.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 1.1The focus on discursive strategies of moral evaluation and discredit
- 2.Main concepts
- 2.1Morality in discourse and the moral order
- 2.2Moral panic
- 2.3Implicitness /explicitness
- 2.4Agency, agentive positionings
- 3.Murder case and court setting
- 4.Trial proceedings: A complex discursive genre
- 5.Analysis
- 5.1Rejecting agency – deflecting responsibility
- 5.2De-moralizing responsibility
- 5.3Metacomments on language aggression and language reticence
- 5.4Socio-spatial construction of moral representation of the victim’s
identity
- 5.5Reported speech: Rumours and hearsay
- 6.Discussion
- 7.Conclusion
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
-
References
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