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Part of
Voices Past and Present - Studies of Involved, Speech-related and Spoken Texts: In honor of Merja Kytö
Edited by Ewa Jonsson and Tove Larsson
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 97] 2020
► pp. 153–172

Chapter 10
Question strategies in the Old Bailey Corpus

| Technical University of Dortmund

This qualitative and quantitative pilot study investigates the use of different question strategies of varying coerciveness in four different periods in the Old Bailey Corpus. It asks what question strategies are used by which trial participants at what time in the later early and late modern periods of English, using Woodbury’s (1984) continuum of control. Data stems from the Old Bailey Corpus 2.0 and is investigated manually. Results show that compared to the defendants asking questions, which was the practice in earlier periods, the legal practitioners asked more varied questions with broader scopes. These drove the discourse of the court proceedings forward more successfully than the more narrow questions asked by the defendants in the early trials under consideration.

Keywords: Late Modern English, Old Bailey Corpus , courtroom discourse, question strategies, continuum of control
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Discourse in contemporary and earlier legal systems
    • 2.1Questions in the present-day courtroom
    • 2.2The situation in the Early Modern English courtroom
  • 3.Data and method
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Questions in the early eighteenth century
    • 4.2Questions in the late eighteenth century
    • 4.3Questions in the early nineteenth century
    • 4.4Questions in the late nineteenth century
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgment
  • Note
  • References
Published online: 5 October 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.97.10ron
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