Investigating audience orientation in courtroom communication
The case of the closing argument
This study presents an empirical study of audience orientation, investigating lawyers’ overt interpersonal negotiation with jurors.
Drawing upon a corpus of the closing arguments of five high-profile American trials, the quantitative and qualitative analysis
identifies the traces and degree of the jury’s presence through pronominal choices, questions, directives, references to shared
knowledge and asides. Such relational practice does not merely “oil the wheels” of courtroom communication but also constitutes a
key way to the meaning-making process in this phase of the trial. The findings attest to the centrality of relational work in
accomplishing transactional goals in institutional discourses.
Keywords: courtroom communication, audience orientation, interaction, directives, closing argument, aside, pronouns, questions, heteroglossic, shared knowledge, relational work, ‘marketing’
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Closing arguments
- 3.Audience orientation
- 4.Data and methodology
- 5.Findings
- Second-person pronouns
- Inclusive first-person plural pronouns
- Questions
- Asides
- References to shared knowledge
- Directives
- 6.Conclusion
- Notes
-
References
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Cited by (3)
Cited by 3 other publications
Yuan, Chuanyou & Huishu Cao
2023.
Justice must be seen to be done: a multimodal attitude analysis of attorneys’ closing arguments.
Semiotica 2023:255
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Wright, David, Jeremy Robson, Helen Murray-Edwards & Natalie Braber
2022.
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► pp. 1 ff.
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