PLM 2005 ABSTRACTS VAULT
see http://elex.amu.edu.pl/ifa/plm
for further details
The idea of interdisciplinarity has been permeating linguistics
for some time now. It has been especially prominent in the disciplines representing
the functional paradigm, like pragmatics, sociolinguistics, or discourse analysis,
cf. Verschueren (1999: 6ff). The present paper is a contribution to a search
of an interface between these areas of linguistics and an area outside linguistics,
i.e. the law. The question to be addressed here concerns the possibility of
establishing a common platform between sociolinguistics, pragmatics, and the
law.
The underlying assumption of the present analysis is that the verbal interaction
going on in court, i.e. court trial discourse, shares many characteristics with
colloquial language. In other words, even though court trial records are written
accounts of a spoken performance, they preserve certain traces of orality, like
the use of performatives, forms of address, or discourse markers. All these
characteristics make court trial records worth exploring for a pragmaticist.
Moreover, in an analysis of court trial records taken in a particular socio-cultural
context, certain sociolinguistic phenomena have to be taken into account, like
the social roles of the participants of a court trial, the power relations between
them, or the socio-historical setting of the trial. Finally, the discourse going
on in court would certainly be of interest to a discourse analyst, and this
is where the three areas of linguistics (pragmatics, sociolinguistics and discourse
analysis) meet the law and a search for an interface is called for.
If one considers the above factors on a synchronic level of analysis and focuses
on contemporary court trial records, the task is much easier than performing
it diachronically, i.e. analysing the socio-pragmatic characteristics of old
court trial records coming from earlier historical periods. The present paper
shows that despite the problems with what Labov (1994: 10ff) calls "bad
data" (i.e. historical materials as potential sources of information about
how language was used in the past), the traces of orality in old court trial
records can be retrieved. It has been confirmed in numerous studies conducted
within the new discipline of diachronic pragmatics (cf. the references in Kryk-Kastovsky
2002: 205f) that old language materials are rich sources of data on language
spoken in the past and it is old court trial records which are particularly
resourceful in this respect. On the basis of the data from selected Early Modern
English court trial records it will be shown in this paper how pragmatics, sociolinguistics
and discourse analysis meet the law in a new interface amalgam called court
trial discourse.
References:
Labov, W. 1994. Principles of linguistic change. Oxford: Blackwell.
Verschueren, J. 1999. Understanding pragmatics. London: Arnold.