Article published in:
Morality and language aggression
Edited by Dániel Z. Kádár and Vahid Parvaresh
[Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict 7:1] 2019
► pp. 105–132

Explicit and implicit discursive strategies and moral order in a trial process

| National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece

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.

Keywords: moral order, courtroom, aggressive discursive strategies, agency, youth identity
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
    • 4.1A note on data
  • 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
Published online: 12 June 2019
https://doi.org/10.1075/jlac.00021.mou
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