I’m thinking and you’re saying: Speaker stance and the progressive of mental verbs in courtroom interaction

This study investigates the use of progressives with mental verbs in courtroom talk and shows a range of subjective meanings which are not delivered by the simple form. Looking at the data from a British libel trial, it explores patterned co-occurrences with first-person subjects vs. second- and third-person subjects, revealing both emphatic, polite and interpretative uses of the analyzed items. In addition, context-sensitivity and speaker status (judge vs. other participants) are shown to be significant factors affecting both the choice of verbs and their interactional configurations. The findings reveal not only well-established uses of “progressive statives” (wonder and think) but also less conventional ones which convey intensity and expressivity (e.g., understand, remember and want). It is also revealed that the use of progressives with mental verbs differs from the deployment of progressives with communication verbs. In both groups of verbs, however, the interpretative meaning is common. In sum, the study situates progressives with mental verbs among stancetaking resources which speakers employ to share their thoughts, wishes and desires, and to position themselves against other interactants and their propositions.

VERB PATTERNS IN TRIAL DISCOURSE: THE CASE OF I THINK

This study revisits the usage of I think in courtroom interaction based on transcripts from a murder trial. The analysis focuses on the structural diversity of I think and some of its variant forms, and it demonstrates pragmatic functions associated with the individual patterns. As the data reveal, I think performs the roles reported in earlier studies (discourse marker, hedge, booster, face-saving device, opinion marker, mindsay marker) as well as increases epistemic distance and decreases the degree of imposition in courtroom questioning. The findings obtained in the current research are also compared with Kaltenböck’s (2013) results documenting various uses of I think and other comment clauses in diachronic spoken data. This comparison demonstrates that, on the one hand, well-established patterns involving I think are frequent in the courtroom data and, on the other, that the recent trends with variant forms of I think – which have been identified in non-specialist settings – are scantily represented.

A question of control? Forms and functions of courtroom questioning in two different adversarial trial systems

This paper compares the questioning of witnesses and defendants in American and Danish courtroom interaction on the basis of one American and three Danish criminal trials. A total of 780 questions are analysed in terms of their morphosyntactic properties as well as speech act functions. Following a general discussion of courtroom questioning and the notions of coercion and control, as well as an outline of legal cultural differences and similarities between American and Danish courtroom interaction, a coding system is developed for the linguistic comparison, and initial quantitative results of the comparison are discussed. Particular attention is given to declarative questions and the ‘communicative’ speech act function, as the linguistic and interactional features of these are shown to be explored in quite different ways in accordance with the legal and cultural contexts in which the courtroom questioning takes place.

The interpreter as a sequential coordinator in courtroom interaction

We present here an ethnographic study of asylum court interpreting with remote participants and video links. First, we describe the multimodal resources interpreters have at their disposal to manage turn-taking and begin interpreting while an asylum seeker’s answer to a question has not come yet to a recognizable completion point. We distinguish between ‘implicit’ configurations, in which a collaborative turn transition is apparently achieved through reorientations of body and gaze, the use of discourse markers, or other conversational strategies, like overlaps and cases where a turn transition is achieved through the use of ‘explicit’ resources such as instructions to stop and requests to give brief answers. We show that the collaborative production of such long answers is affected by the remote placement of the interpreter, and that recurrent trouble in the management of turn transitions between the asylum seeker and the interpreter during extended narratives may be detrimental to the asylum seeker’s case.

The Dialogic Turn in Language Study

Over the past hundred years, linguistic schools have put forward and adopted either divergent or convergent positions regarding what language consists of. In this paper, I shall examine the dialogic turn in language study (i.e. language use is dialogic use, any action is dialogically directed either initiatively or reactively) so that readers can get an insight into the complexity of human communication. After the overview, I shall focus on some integrated components derived from the complex whole of dialogic action such as teaching, culture, business, courtroom interaction with a view to identifying the advantages of embracing dialogical theories of language and meaning.

Interjections in American and Danish courtroom interaction: A linguistic and legal cultural comparison

This study compares the use of interjections by the defence lawyers in an American and a Danish criminal trial during their direct-examination of their clients, i.e. the defendants. Through quantitative and qualitative analyses it is shown that the Danish lawyer uses interjections much more frequently than the American lawyer, and that the interjections used by the American lawyer tend to have different interactional functions than those used by the Danish lawyer. Thus, while the American lawyer practices a composed and transactional style of interaction, the Danish lawyer adopts a fairly loose and casual style. The interactional styles of the two lawyers, as seen through their use of interjections, are discussed and explained as reflections of central cultural traits of the two countries’ legal traditions, drawing, amongst others, on the basic divide between common law adversarialism and civil law inquisitorialism.

The Emotional Interaction of Judicial Objectivity

Like other Western legal systems, the Swedish legal system constructs objectivity as an unemotional state of being. We argue that the enactment of objectivity in situ relies on objectivity work including emotion management and empathy. Building on qualitative interviews and observations in Swedish district courts, we analyse courtroom interaction through a dramaturgical lens, highlighting tacit signals and interprofessional emotional communication aimed to secure objective procedures, while sustaining the ideal of unemotional objectivity. By analytically separating objectivity from impartiality, we show that judges’ objective performances balance empathic attunement and restrained expressions to uphold an impartial presentation. Prosecutors take pride in maintaining objectivity in spite of being partial, fostering the ability to switch between engagement and disengagement depending on the strength of the case. The requirement for legal professionals to be autonomous demands skillful inter-professional emotional attuning. Thereby, collaborative professional emotion management achieves the ideal of justice as being objective. Al igual que otros sistemas jurídicos occidentales, el sueco construye la objetividad como un estado del ser no emocional. Argumentamos que la aplicación de la objetividad in situ se apoya en un trabajo de objetividad que incluye la gestión de las emociones y la empatía. Basándonos en entrevistas cualitativas y en observaciones en juzgados de Suecia, analizamos la interacción que se da en el tribunal, destacando señales tácitas y comunicación emocional interprofesional destinada a asegurar procedimientos objetivos, a la vez que a sostener el ideal de objetividad no emotiva. Al separar analíticamente objetividad de imparcialidad, mostramos que las actuaciones objetivas de los jueces suponen un equilibrio entre la sintonía empática y la contención expresiva para defender una presentación imparcial. El requisito de que los profesionales del derecho sean autónomos demanda una sintonía emocional interprofesional. Por tanto, la gestión emocional colaborativa de los profesionales cumple con el ideal de justicia objetiva.

Introduction to special issue on Forensic Linguistics: European Perspectives

This special issue of Nordic Journal of Linguistics is dedicated to the emerging field of forensic linguistics. There are competing definitions and delimitations of this term but here we will use it to refer to the investigation and elucidation of language evidence in a legal context. This includes the scrutiny of language data from different stages of the legal process, ranging from emergency calls to police interviews and courtroom interaction, as well as expert assessment and witness testimony in cases where the meaning or authorship of texts or utterances are questioned. While the analysis of authentic case data is often preferred or even required, access to such highly sensitive data types is naturally restricted by legal and ethical boundaries. An increasing amount of studies therefore employ experimental designs to test hypotheses and improve methodologies.

“We’re not in a club now”: a neo-Brown and Levinson approach to analyzing courtroom data

Discursive approaches to analyzing politeness often eschew Brown and Levinson’s theory of politeness as being too dependent on speech act theory and Gricean pragmatics. However, in this analysis of a courtroom interaction I will show how some of the concepts from Brown and Levinson’s theory, such as face-threatening behaviour and positive and negative politeness, can provide us with a vocabulary with which to talk about dynamic situated interaction. These are combined with reference to the norms of behaviour in the context of situation, as well as an appreciation of how meaning is defined as negotiated by participants as they interact. In the interaction under question here I show how the meaning of these utterances can be observed in the data themselves by looking at the sequence and take-up of turns at talk and by commenting on the relationship between the form of the utterances and the context in which they are uttered. In this way, some of the most useful concepts from Brown and Levinson are applied to the data from a constructivist perspective.