Cover not available
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
References (10)
References
2010. A diachronic investigation of English courtroom practice. In The Routledge Handbook of Forensic Linguistics, M. Coulthard & A. Johnson (eds), 185–198. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Culpeper, J. & Kytö, M. 2010. Early Modern English Dialogues: Spoken Interaction as Writing. Cambridge: CUP.Google Scholar
Gibbons, J. 2003. Forensic Linguistics: An Introduction to Language in the Justice System. London: Wiley Blackwell.Google Scholar
Holt, E. & Johnson, A. 2010. Legal talk. Socio-pragmatic aspects of legal talk: police interviews and trial discourse. In The Routledge Handbook of Forensic Linguistics, M. Coulthard & A. Johnson (eds), 21–36. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Huber, M., Nissel, M. & Puga, K. 2016. Old Bailey Corpus 2.0., hdl:11858/00-246C-0000-0023-8CFB-2. <[URL]> (15 May 2019).Google Scholar
Newbury, P. & Johnson, A. 2006. Suspects’ resistance to constraining and coercive questioning strategies in the police interview. International Journal of Speech, Language and the Law 13(2): 213–240.Google Scholar
Tkačuková, T. 2010. Representing oneself. Cross-examination questioning: lay people as cross-examiners. In The Routledge Handbook of Forensic Linguistics, M. Coulthard & A. Johnson (eds), 333–345. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Rama-Martinez, E. 2013. Courtroom interaction between 1760–1860: On defendants taking (re)initiating moves. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 14(2): 237–262. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Woodbury, H. 1984. The strategic use of questions in court. Semiotic 48(3–4): 197–228.Google Scholar