Interacting with the expert witness: courtroom epistemics under a discourse analyst's lens
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[1] Uniwersytet Jagielloński
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- Localización: Language as Evidence: Doing Forensic Linguistics / coord. por Victoria Guillén Nieto, Dieter Stein, 2022, ISBN 978-3-030-84329-8, págs. 105-130
- Idioma: inglés
- Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
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Resumen
This chapter looks at the interactional behaviour of expert witnesses and counsel acting within the adversarial trial’s constraints. Adopting a discourse-analytic perspective, the chapter demonstrates what stances the expert witnesses and the counsel adopt and what interactional resources they employ to position themselves vis-à-vis their interactants and their knowledge claims. Drawing on such linguistic concepts as speaker commitment, epistemicity and evidentiality, the chapter examines how expert knowledge is claimed, disclaimed, attributed and contested. The chapter specifically considers the interplay of the pronouns I, you and we with verbal markers of experiential, cognitive and communicative stance (Marín-Arrese, Commitment and subjectivity in the discourse of a judicial inquiry. In R. Salkie, P. Busuttil, & J. van der Auwera (Eds.), Modality in English (pp. 237–268). Mouton de Gruyter, 2009) as well as negation. The analysis reveals a correlation between the participants’ roles and communicative goals and the type of stance they adopt during testimony. It thus demonstrates the discursive processes of turning facts and expert opinions into evidence and explains how legal truth is constructed in courtroom proceedings.
