Discourse Analysis in the Legal Context

Abstract

Based on my experience in hundreds of civil and criminal cases, it would appear that lawyers and prosecutors focus on the smaller units of language, those single words, phrases and sentences that appear to be “smoking gun” evidence of guilt. In contrast, linguists understand that a more effective analysis proceeds from the larger language units to the smaller ones. The optimal approach is to first identify the speech event that contextualizes the rest of the language in that text. Next, in more or less the following sequence, the linguist identifies the participants' schemas, agendas (revealed by topics introduced and responses to the topics of others), speech acts, conversational strategies used by the participants, and finally the smaller language units of sentences, phrases, and words that usually comprise the purported “smoking guns” in both criminal and civil law cases. Evidence from actual criminal cases illustrate this procedure

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 23 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.