While the past decade has seen much scholarship on the legal language of the Salem witchcraft trials in 1692, few studies have been completed on the narrative features of petitions. This study focuses not solely on the formulaic or structural aspects of petitions but introduces and explores various social narratives within them. These social narratives emphasize the petitioner’s family life, religious beliefs and activities, and status in the community. The data consist of 21 petitions presented in 1692 during the height of the crisis (March to December), including both petitions written by individuals accused of witchcraft and those written by other individuals. The three main components – religious, familial, community – of social narratives are analyzed. The study concludes that the intersection between formulaic petitionary language and social narratives that evoke both family and religion dominate in the petitions of 1692. Petitions are used to reframe the accused as participants in a larger social narrative rather than as witches or wizards.
This study explores the representation of child rape victims through an examination of the pragmatic effects of negative questioning in eighteenth century trial records in the Old Bailey Proceedings (Hitchcock et al., 2012). We see how victim identities are linguistically constructed through methods of biased, stereotypical, and negative questioning of the rape allegation. Using a combined corpus-based, sociopragmatic, discourse-analytical approach, a corpus of 36 child rape trials has been collected from the larger online database, to explore how the choice of questioning constructs the defendant and the crime in benign ways and the victim in damaging ways. Analysis reveals how ideologies about rape were reproduced in the historical courtroom. Drawing on Reisigl and Wodak’s (2009) “discourse-historical approach” we are able to see how contextual factors, such as rape myths of the time (Simpson 1986), work in conjunction with negative questions to construct problematic victim identities. The legal-pragmatic effects of these questions and their underlying ideologies, which are both reflected and constituted in the social attitudes of the time, are amplified by the legal institution, contributing to a high proportion of not guilty verdicts and indictments to lesser charges. This research reflects on recent calls in the contemporary context for better victim treatment in general and more witness sensitivity in rape trials in particular.
This paper studies the role of conversational implicatures in the 17th century courtroom discourse. My hypothesis is that the use of the literal vs. non-literal language runs along the distinction between the powerless interrogated (the defendant, the witnesses) and the powerful interrogators (the judge, the counsel). While the interrogated had to resort to literal language in order to observe one of the rules of the Miranda warning (“Anything you say can be used against you”), the interrogators often employed different kinds of non-literal language for rhetorical purposes. Thus, the implicatures derivable from their discourse were instances of irony and even figures of speech, like metonymy or metaphor, which is illustrated by excerpts from three Early Modern English courtroom records. The trials of two representatives of the English nobility, The Trial of Titus Oates and The Trial of Lady Alice Lisle (both dated 1685) are contrasted with a unique case of the trial of a monarch, The Trial of King Charles (1649). The analysis reveals that while my hypothesis is corroborated by the data from the former trials, in the trial of a monarch some additional socio-historical variables have to be considered.
In July 1535, the trial of Sir Thomas More took place, in which the ex-Lord Chancellor was accused, and found guilty, of high treason for not expressing support for two statutes passed in 1534, which formed the basis of Henry VIII’s constitutional and religious changes: the Act of Succession and the Act of Supremacy. One of the stipulations was the requirement for people to take an oath in support of these changes. More refused to take the oath, arguing that according to the literal interpretation of the statutes he could be found guilty of misprision [concealment] of treason only, and not of treason itself.
However, it will be argued, More misunderstood – or refused to understand – the ultimate purpose of the statutes, which may stem from his being a lawyer: he gave the statute a literal interpretation and ignored extralinguistic information, since such information does not play a role in interpretation, unless a literal interpretation would not make sense in the context (a possible precursor of Heydon’s Case of 1584).
It is widely accepted that the legal sub-language – the language of the written law, court discussions, and legal documents – needs rephrasing in order to make it understandable to legal laypersons. Adler (2012) holds that this is possible: legal texts can be rephrased in plain language (rather than in “legalese”). The features that need rephrasing in order to make the legal language understandable to legal laypersons concern both the rich technical vocabulary of the legal sub-language and its syntactic complexity. There is, moreover, a third feature that makes the legal sub-language impenetrable for laypersons – implicit intertextual and interdiscursive links. It is the combination of these three features – the rich technical vocabulary, the syntactic complexity, and implicit intertextuality (intertextual links presented without lucid reference to their explanations) – that makes the legal sub-language impenetrable.
The legal sub-language is, naturally, the language used by legal experts in order to communicate with one another. Obviously, legal experts are supposed to know the relevant legal background knowledge of legal texts they work with; therefore, like other human communicators, authors of legal texts imply legal background knowledge, including the background knowledge relevant to their messages, rather than present it explicitly. The point of this analysis is that it is this implied professional knowledge which makes it hard for legal laypersons to understand legal texts.
Reconstructing the meaning of a text is a complex operation, involving linguistic, situational, inter-textual, cognitive, cultural, and ideological parameters. Due to a well-known polarization in contemporary linguistic theory, the interpretation process spans between an abstract “linguistic” meaning and a concrete “communicative” meaning. The former is the result of combining the meanings of the lexical units following the rules of syntax and punctuation, while the latter results from inferential processes, where linguistic meaning is taken as a point of departure and enriched with further information. The distinction between linguistic and communicative meaning maps onto the boundary between semantics and pragmatics, the conventional meaning of linguistic units vs. the meaning inferred through the interaction of linguistic meaning with context (Hansen 2008: 12ff.; Visconti 2014: 247ff.).
This chapter focuses on court decisions, a type of text in decisions, the interplay between semantics and pragmatics is particularly striking. It will investigate the way in which the interpreter, i.e. the judge, takes the linguistic meaning as an input (a set of instructions) and enriches it with further information by means of prepositions or connectives, which are often neglected in the legal literature, despite playing a crucial role in steering the interpretation.
Judges often engage in various types of linguistic analysis. The United States Supreme Court, for example, has exhibited both surprising linguistic acumen and, on the other hand, woeful disregard for how language operates in real life situations. Of course, there is not always a single correct linguistic analysis of legislative texts or conspiratorial conversations. Additionally, factors other than language are often relevant in determining the meaning of legal language; these factors are particularly relevant when the text is incomplete or ambiguous. But when interpreting a text, be it statutory or conversational, a careful linguistic analysis should always be the point of departure.
This study examines power relations in two different but interrelated courtroom trials within the Nigerian socio-judicial space. One reports barrister-questioning strategies in the course of legal proceedings concerning a land dispute, and the other focuses on two election petition tribunal trials involving various barrister-witness dialogues. This article highlights the way language is used as a symbol of power in the two courtroom dialogues. Moreover, it considers questioning procedures in conjunction with the forms of witnesses’ answers and how these reproduce the nature of power and control in this institutional setting. Drawing on pragmatics and insights from Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), we show that courtroom conventions as well as social circumstances impose some constraints on what is said and how it is said. Some insights might, thus, be gained as to the extent in which social and other extra-judicial circumstances may impact the strategy that witnesses adopt to tell their stories during interrogation.
The findings support the interplay between socio-[cultural] circumstances and legal considerations in some typical courtroom trials in Nigeria. It confirms the universality of legal proceedings, especially as regards some similarity in the various interrogative patterns that counsel deploy in courtroom encounters and how these show the asymmetric nature of legal discourse and the effect on text and talk of the participants.
This chapter investigates an inquisitorial system that has thus far received little attention, despite the need for research on the culture of Egyptian interrogations. It focuses on suspects’ responses in interrogations, with special focus on ‘I do not know’ as a response strategy. In addition, it investigates the nature of prosecution questions that produces these responses. These signs of prosecutor power, and control and suspects’ resistance are investigated using a qualitative, discourse-pragmatic approach. The data are selected from a larger collection of Egyptian prosecution interrogations to focus on the strategies employed by professional and worker suspects. Data include interrogations with ex-president Hosni Mubarak and his two sons, Gamal, and Alaa, which took place in 2011 after the 25th January revolution as well as ordinary workers, traders and company managers. Previous research (e.g. Harris 1991), though in adversarial settings, has focused on contest, avoidance, refusal, and emphasis of status as strategies for resistance. ‘I do not know’ responses were found to have different structures: I do not know only, I do not know with explanation and emphatic responses. Each of these subcategories plays a different pragmatic role in the interrogations.
This chapter focuses on a now-infamous case involving 20-year old Grant Sattaur and a Californian Police Negotiator. We focus, in particular, on the last four minutes of their two-hour conversation in 2007, prior to Sattaur taking his own life. We demonstrate that, by this point in their discussion, the Negotiator was not making effective use of recognised crisis negotiation procedures as set out within models such as the behavioural staircase (Vecchi et al. 2005) and SAFE (Hammer 2007). We then go on to demonstrate that, had the negotiator had an awareness of some of the pragmatic principles of communication, he might have been more able to (re)instate components of the negotiation staircase and/or SAFE – even at this late stage in the conversation. This work reflects a larger project, via which the authors explore the linguistic “how to” of influence (Archer and Smithson 2016) with UK police negotiators, in ways that complement their existing knowledge of the psychology of influence (e.g., Cialdini 2008). Police negotiators are particularly encouraged to reject any notion of mythical ‘verbal magic bullets’ (Burleson and Goldsmith 1998: 259), which work regardless of context and/or an interlocutor’s resistance, because of the complexity of crisis negotiation, communicatively speaking.
This chapter examines how an interviewee with borderline intellectual functioning reversed his denial and gave a false confession in investigative interviews conducted by a prosecutor in a murder case in Japan. While the interviewing prosecutor’s varying approaches to questioning are likely to have contributed to the interviewee’s changing statements, the analysis also suggests that the interviewer either ignored or was unaware of the subtle cues of problematic communication, especially the ways in which the interviewee used the phrases wakaranai (I don’t know) and gomennasai (I am sorry), as well as his long silences. It is argued that such miscommunication often arose because of the interlocutors’ mismatch of knowledge schemata. The analysis demonstrates that tension and lack of interactional alignment are likely to have triggered shifts in interactional frames, which gradually led the suspect with a high level of susceptibility to pressure from law enforcement officers to making a false confession. The study suggests that discourse-pragmatic approaches to investigative interviews of vulnerable interviewees can contribute to a better understanding of miscommunication and false confessions, and improvement in interviewing practice. It also brings an insight into the role of the power dynamics operating in the specific context of criminal investigation in Japan.
The central question asked in this chapter is how to reconcile the well-known conundrum of legal language being at the same time decontextualized yet influenced by context. This paradox is addressed here by reviewing the meaning of currently topical legal notions in environments where there are two or more valid jurisdictions – the national and the supranational or transnational – simultaneously present. Textualism and contextualism need not be conflicting paradigms in finding a solution between competing meanings. Rather, a balance could be struck through linguistic explanation. The paradox of competing interpretations is discussed here from the point of view of both law-givers and law-takers.
Within the context of legal systems Canada manifests unique features originating in the co-existence of the two different legal systems of common law and civil law, worded respectively in English and French. Some converging and diverging elements of this idiosyncratic bijural and bilingual legal regime are examined and terminological issues arising in the process of harmonizing federal legislation with the Code Civil du Québec are discussed. The focus is on the procedure adopted in cases of conceptual and terminological non-correspondence, the drafting techniques employed, and the justification for choice in each particular instance contingent on the context, with the ultimate aim of providing optimal solutions regarding current pressing difficulties in the harmonization of legal terms in the supranational and multilingual system of the European Union.
While the past decade has seen much scholarship on the legal language of the Salem witchcraft trials in 1692, few studies have been completed on the narrative features of petitions. This study focuses not solely on the formulaic or structural aspects of petitions but introduces and explores various social narratives within them. These social narratives emphasize the petitioner’s family life, religious beliefs and activities, and status in the community. The data consist of 21 petitions presented in 1692 during the height of the crisis (March to December), including both petitions written by individuals accused of witchcraft and those written by other individuals. The three main components – religious, familial, community – of social narratives are analyzed. The study concludes that the intersection between formulaic petitionary language and social narratives that evoke both family and religion dominate in the petitions of 1692. Petitions are used to reframe the accused as participants in a larger social narrative rather than as witches or wizards.
This study explores the representation of child rape victims through an examination of the pragmatic effects of negative questioning in eighteenth century trial records in the Old Bailey Proceedings (Hitchcock et al., 2012). We see how victim identities are linguistically constructed through methods of biased, stereotypical, and negative questioning of the rape allegation. Using a combined corpus-based, sociopragmatic, discourse-analytical approach, a corpus of 36 child rape trials has been collected from the larger online database, to explore how the choice of questioning constructs the defendant and the crime in benign ways and the victim in damaging ways. Analysis reveals how ideologies about rape were reproduced in the historical courtroom. Drawing on Reisigl and Wodak’s (2009) “discourse-historical approach” we are able to see how contextual factors, such as rape myths of the time (Simpson 1986), work in conjunction with negative questions to construct problematic victim identities. The legal-pragmatic effects of these questions and their underlying ideologies, which are both reflected and constituted in the social attitudes of the time, are amplified by the legal institution, contributing to a high proportion of not guilty verdicts and indictments to lesser charges. This research reflects on recent calls in the contemporary context for better victim treatment in general and more witness sensitivity in rape trials in particular.
This paper studies the role of conversational implicatures in the 17th century courtroom discourse. My hypothesis is that the use of the literal vs. non-literal language runs along the distinction between the powerless interrogated (the defendant, the witnesses) and the powerful interrogators (the judge, the counsel). While the interrogated had to resort to literal language in order to observe one of the rules of the Miranda warning (“Anything you say can be used against you”), the interrogators often employed different kinds of non-literal language for rhetorical purposes. Thus, the implicatures derivable from their discourse were instances of irony and even figures of speech, like metonymy or metaphor, which is illustrated by excerpts from three Early Modern English courtroom records. The trials of two representatives of the English nobility, The Trial of Titus Oates and The Trial of Lady Alice Lisle (both dated 1685) are contrasted with a unique case of the trial of a monarch, The Trial of King Charles (1649). The analysis reveals that while my hypothesis is corroborated by the data from the former trials, in the trial of a monarch some additional socio-historical variables have to be considered.
In July 1535, the trial of Sir Thomas More took place, in which the ex-Lord Chancellor was accused, and found guilty, of high treason for not expressing support for two statutes passed in 1534, which formed the basis of Henry VIII’s constitutional and religious changes: the Act of Succession and the Act of Supremacy. One of the stipulations was the requirement for people to take an oath in support of these changes. More refused to take the oath, arguing that according to the literal interpretation of the statutes he could be found guilty of misprision [concealment] of treason only, and not of treason itself.
However, it will be argued, More misunderstood – or refused to understand – the ultimate purpose of the statutes, which may stem from his being a lawyer: he gave the statute a literal interpretation and ignored extralinguistic information, since such information does not play a role in interpretation, unless a literal interpretation would not make sense in the context (a possible precursor of Heydon’s Case of 1584).
It is widely accepted that the legal sub-language – the language of the written law, court discussions, and legal documents – needs rephrasing in order to make it understandable to legal laypersons. Adler (2012) holds that this is possible: legal texts can be rephrased in plain language (rather than in “legalese”). The features that need rephrasing in order to make the legal language understandable to legal laypersons concern both the rich technical vocabulary of the legal sub-language and its syntactic complexity. There is, moreover, a third feature that makes the legal sub-language impenetrable for laypersons – implicit intertextual and interdiscursive links. It is the combination of these three features – the rich technical vocabulary, the syntactic complexity, and implicit intertextuality (intertextual links presented without lucid reference to their explanations) – that makes the legal sub-language impenetrable.
The legal sub-language is, naturally, the language used by legal experts in order to communicate with one another. Obviously, legal experts are supposed to know the relevant legal background knowledge of legal texts they work with; therefore, like other human communicators, authors of legal texts imply legal background knowledge, including the background knowledge relevant to their messages, rather than present it explicitly. The point of this analysis is that it is this implied professional knowledge which makes it hard for legal laypersons to understand legal texts.
Reconstructing the meaning of a text is a complex operation, involving linguistic, situational, inter-textual, cognitive, cultural, and ideological parameters. Due to a well-known polarization in contemporary linguistic theory, the interpretation process spans between an abstract “linguistic” meaning and a concrete “communicative” meaning. The former is the result of combining the meanings of the lexical units following the rules of syntax and punctuation, while the latter results from inferential processes, where linguistic meaning is taken as a point of departure and enriched with further information. The distinction between linguistic and communicative meaning maps onto the boundary between semantics and pragmatics, the conventional meaning of linguistic units vs. the meaning inferred through the interaction of linguistic meaning with context (Hansen 2008: 12ff.; Visconti 2014: 247ff.).
This chapter focuses on court decisions, a type of text in decisions, the interplay between semantics and pragmatics is particularly striking. It will investigate the way in which the interpreter, i.e. the judge, takes the linguistic meaning as an input (a set of instructions) and enriches it with further information by means of prepositions or connectives, which are often neglected in the legal literature, despite playing a crucial role in steering the interpretation.
Judges often engage in various types of linguistic analysis. The United States Supreme Court, for example, has exhibited both surprising linguistic acumen and, on the other hand, woeful disregard for how language operates in real life situations. Of course, there is not always a single correct linguistic analysis of legislative texts or conspiratorial conversations. Additionally, factors other than language are often relevant in determining the meaning of legal language; these factors are particularly relevant when the text is incomplete or ambiguous. But when interpreting a text, be it statutory or conversational, a careful linguistic analysis should always be the point of departure.
This study examines power relations in two different but interrelated courtroom trials within the Nigerian socio-judicial space. One reports barrister-questioning strategies in the course of legal proceedings concerning a land dispute, and the other focuses on two election petition tribunal trials involving various barrister-witness dialogues. This article highlights the way language is used as a symbol of power in the two courtroom dialogues. Moreover, it considers questioning procedures in conjunction with the forms of witnesses’ answers and how these reproduce the nature of power and control in this institutional setting. Drawing on pragmatics and insights from Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), we show that courtroom conventions as well as social circumstances impose some constraints on what is said and how it is said. Some insights might, thus, be gained as to the extent in which social and other extra-judicial circumstances may impact the strategy that witnesses adopt to tell their stories during interrogation.
The findings support the interplay between socio-[cultural] circumstances and legal considerations in some typical courtroom trials in Nigeria. It confirms the universality of legal proceedings, especially as regards some similarity in the various interrogative patterns that counsel deploy in courtroom encounters and how these show the asymmetric nature of legal discourse and the effect on text and talk of the participants.
This chapter investigates an inquisitorial system that has thus far received little attention, despite the need for research on the culture of Egyptian interrogations. It focuses on suspects’ responses in interrogations, with special focus on ‘I do not know’ as a response strategy. In addition, it investigates the nature of prosecution questions that produces these responses. These signs of prosecutor power, and control and suspects’ resistance are investigated using a qualitative, discourse-pragmatic approach. The data are selected from a larger collection of Egyptian prosecution interrogations to focus on the strategies employed by professional and worker suspects. Data include interrogations with ex-president Hosni Mubarak and his two sons, Gamal, and Alaa, which took place in 2011 after the 25th January revolution as well as ordinary workers, traders and company managers. Previous research (e.g. Harris 1991), though in adversarial settings, has focused on contest, avoidance, refusal, and emphasis of status as strategies for resistance. ‘I do not know’ responses were found to have different structures: I do not know only, I do not know with explanation and emphatic responses. Each of these subcategories plays a different pragmatic role in the interrogations.
This chapter focuses on a now-infamous case involving 20-year old Grant Sattaur and a Californian Police Negotiator. We focus, in particular, on the last four minutes of their two-hour conversation in 2007, prior to Sattaur taking his own life. We demonstrate that, by this point in their discussion, the Negotiator was not making effective use of recognised crisis negotiation procedures as set out within models such as the behavioural staircase (Vecchi et al. 2005) and SAFE (Hammer 2007). We then go on to demonstrate that, had the negotiator had an awareness of some of the pragmatic principles of communication, he might have been more able to (re)instate components of the negotiation staircase and/or SAFE – even at this late stage in the conversation. This work reflects a larger project, via which the authors explore the linguistic “how to” of influence (Archer and Smithson 2016) with UK police negotiators, in ways that complement their existing knowledge of the psychology of influence (e.g., Cialdini 2008). Police negotiators are particularly encouraged to reject any notion of mythical ‘verbal magic bullets’ (Burleson and Goldsmith 1998: 259), which work regardless of context and/or an interlocutor’s resistance, because of the complexity of crisis negotiation, communicatively speaking.
This chapter examines how an interviewee with borderline intellectual functioning reversed his denial and gave a false confession in investigative interviews conducted by a prosecutor in a murder case in Japan. While the interviewing prosecutor’s varying approaches to questioning are likely to have contributed to the interviewee’s changing statements, the analysis also suggests that the interviewer either ignored or was unaware of the subtle cues of problematic communication, especially the ways in which the interviewee used the phrases wakaranai (I don’t know) and gomennasai (I am sorry), as well as his long silences. It is argued that such miscommunication often arose because of the interlocutors’ mismatch of knowledge schemata. The analysis demonstrates that tension and lack of interactional alignment are likely to have triggered shifts in interactional frames, which gradually led the suspect with a high level of susceptibility to pressure from law enforcement officers to making a false confession. The study suggests that discourse-pragmatic approaches to investigative interviews of vulnerable interviewees can contribute to a better understanding of miscommunication and false confessions, and improvement in interviewing practice. It also brings an insight into the role of the power dynamics operating in the specific context of criminal investigation in Japan.
The central question asked in this chapter is how to reconcile the well-known conundrum of legal language being at the same time decontextualized yet influenced by context. This paradox is addressed here by reviewing the meaning of currently topical legal notions in environments where there are two or more valid jurisdictions – the national and the supranational or transnational – simultaneously present. Textualism and contextualism need not be conflicting paradigms in finding a solution between competing meanings. Rather, a balance could be struck through linguistic explanation. The paradox of competing interpretations is discussed here from the point of view of both law-givers and law-takers.
Within the context of legal systems Canada manifests unique features originating in the co-existence of the two different legal systems of common law and civil law, worded respectively in English and French. Some converging and diverging elements of this idiosyncratic bijural and bilingual legal regime are examined and terminological issues arising in the process of harmonizing federal legislation with the Code Civil du Québec are discussed. The focus is on the procedure adopted in cases of conceptual and terminological non-correspondence, the drafting techniques employed, and the justification for choice in each particular instance contingent on the context, with the ultimate aim of providing optimal solutions regarding current pressing difficulties in the harmonization of legal terms in the supranational and multilingual system of the European Union.