1,721,464 research outputs found
Courtroom discourse in the witness examination. the case of the public inquiry
No full textThe leading questions from which the present study originates could be summarised as follows: How do lawyers use questions to influence witness’ narratives? Are Public Inquiries totally inquisitorial from a linguistic point of view? The first question is bound to the methods to be selected for the analysis, while the second to the peculiarity of the data chosen. Indeed, the majority of the studies on courtroom discourse focuses on trial as a legal genre and research on the Public Inquiry is very limited. Moreover, even in the few contributions available, none considers this proceeding in a genre perspective. The present study starts from the macro-context of the speech event analysed and proceeds to an in-depth study of its linguistic constituents. The analysis will set up a discourse and genre framework to define at first the discursive and generic structure of the Public Inquiry; the scope of the observation will then be restricted to the role of reformulations that are central in the construction of lawyers’ questions. The macro-analysis will begin with the legal framework of the Public Inquiry in order to highlight its position and function in the Common Law legal system. This general overview on the proceeding from a legal point of view will be the basic background to understand the discursive dynamics of the Public Inquiry and in particular of the witness examination as a genre. Specifically, we will consider the different stages of this communicative event analysing their linguistic structure. Moreover, in order to demonstrate the peculiarities of the Public Inquiry, we will also observe differences and similarities with trials, which have been thoroughly described by the previous literature on legal discourses.
Finally the analysis will move to the micro-analysis of the genre selected and will concentrate on reformulations as linguistic means exploited by lawyers in order to put effective requests to the witness. To achieve this purpose, the study combines a text perspective (qualitative description, especially for reformulations) and a corpus perspective. On the one hand, manual analysis will identify the reiterated patterns in the use of reformulations. On the other hand, the computerised aid provided by corpus linguistics will integrate the manual analysis, providing the frequency and recursivity of the metadiscursive items associated. The general approach adopted will thus be corpus-driven and the theoretical statements made by the present work will derive from the presence and observation of corpus evidence. Consequently, all the theoretical statements will directly reflect the evidence offered by the corpus. The textual and the computerized perspectives will be fused together in order to gain a complete overview of the linguistic strategies used by the legal professionals during the witness examination. The issues raised and the methodological framework described in this section will be further clarified in section 1.3. where we will discuss the structural organization of the work. In the next section 1.2., we will explain where our research questions originate and why we decided to choose the Public Inquiry witness examinations as data for our analysis
Memoranda of Understanding and contracts. An analysis of speech acts
No full textThe aim of this paper is to explore the differences in the use of modals to create illocutionary acts considering three legal genres, the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU), the Letter of Intent (LoI) and the contract. On the one hand, the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) is an agreement that has hardly been investigated in the existing literature and it is used to establish cooperation in research and in academic/cultural activities between universities. On the other hand, the Letter of Intent is a genre generally used in corporate communication that precedes the MoU in the development of joint research nets. The MoU can be considered as a specific type of contract, thus our research questions are: what are the most significant differences in modal realization among the MoU the LoI and corporate contracts? Are illocutionary acts genres-bound? In particular, thestudy sets out to explore the use of speech acts. Therefore, it focuses on regulative patterns considering the rhetorical functions of directive and commissive acts (Trosborg 1995) in this legal genre. The analysis is based on a corpus of MoUs signed by Anglophone universities (UK – US – AUS). The results obtained are then compared to those of two comparable corpora of contracts and of Letters of Intent (LoI) in order to show differences and similarities in the patterns observed. From a methodological point of view, the study integrates corpus linguistics and discourse analytical perspectives in the investigation of textual data, relying on both qualitative and quantitative analysis. A combination of computational analysis and manual tagging is employed to select all the relevant regulative speech acts in the corpus. Results show that the MoU is a “hybrid genre” (Bhatia 2004), an instance of “interdiscursive colonisation” (Bhatia 2011: 106) in which the directive component of the contract is combined with the commissive one of the Letter of Inten
Variation across disciplines. The case of applied linguistics and medicine
No full textThe study compares applied linguistics and medicine abstracts by examining their structure, metadiscourse, and verbs of saying. medicine prefers the inclusion of the results and discussion moves, the situating research move and the authorial persona in the methods move. Another meaningful difference is the greater attribution of utterances to others in applied linguistics. These findings are interpreted as signaling a greater emphasis on empiricism on the part of medical authors, as well as a more elaborate construction of a community of informed readers
Genre Hybridization in Legal Discourse. The case of the Public Inquiry Witness Examination
No full textll contributors in this volume analyze specialized genres in private and public as well as professional and institutional domains. The overall focus is genre hybridization across time and space (inclusive of resistance and creativity) and the coherence across the volume is achieved through the acknowledgement of contemporary socio-discursive practices, especially new technologies, globalization, multimodal representation and role-relations
Book Review "Language from Below – The Irish Language, Ideology and Power in the 20th-Century Ireland", Language Awareness
No full textAnalysis of the role of irish language in the struggle against the supremacy of England in the 20th centur
Reformulation and Conflict in Witness Examination: The Case of Public Inquiries
No full textThis paper focuses on the development of witness examination as an argumentative dialogue between legal professionals and lay-people, considering in
particular the case of Public Inquiries in Great Britain. This paper discusses the retention of traces of the adversarial system, typical of Common Law trials, in this
type of inquisitorial proceedings, stressing on how counsels exploit some linguistic features to control both the form and the ideational content of the exchange as well
as the power relationship with the witness. The analysis is carried out on a corpus of 15 days of witness examination transcripts (507,346 words) collected from three
different Public Inquiries, namely Bloody Sunday Inquiry (Northern Ireland), Shipman Inquiry (England), and Cullen Inquiry (Scotland), to achieve a wider
perspective on Common Law administrative justice. The study is based on a discourse and genre analytic approach for the macro-analysis of Public Inquiries in the
context of courtroom discourse and of witness examination as a genre that develops within this discourse framework. Subsequently, a micro-analysis of the linguistic
features used by counsel in questions to argumentatively shape the content and the
form of the exchange is provided. We also take into consideration the role of
metadiscourse (textual and interpersonal), repetitions and reformulations. Preliminary
results show that these linguistic features provide valuable evidence for the
hypothesis that the adversarial side of the argumentative dialogue between legal
professionals and lay-people during the witness examination of Public Inquiries is
retained
La rappresentazione della ricerca negli accordi universitari europei e statunitensi
No full textAnalisi di corpora di accordi internazionali di ricerca in lingua inglese, analisi del genere comunicativo e delle parole della ricerc
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