T-Offenses and Metapragmatic Attacks: Strategies of Interactional Dominance

Abstract

Drifting along the imaginary boundary between communication and society, this article deals with communicative practices during criminal trials taking place in Naples, Italy. It describes in detail pronominal violations and metapragmatic attacks used in court in the struggle for hegemony and control over the social construction of credibility. It analyzes the communicative impact that metalinguistic commentaries on pronominal violations have during conflict talk. Reviewing the literature on T/V, it introduces a new understanding of pronominal asymmetries based on the opposition marked/unmarked. Pronominal offenses in a dispute occur when (a) the unmarked address frame has either been disputed or purposefully challenged by one or more participants, and (b) a recipient has metapragmatically called attention, or metapragmatically attacked, the opposing party's choice of a marked code, interpreting the violation as a personal offense.

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