LEGAL DISCOURSE, POWER AND PRAGMATICS

Vol.6,No.2(2013)

Monika Gyuró

https://doi.org/10.5817/DI2013-2-5

PDF
Abstract
This paper explores crime reports on verdicts and sentences in child/teenager murder cases in the British press with a view to demonstrating that ‘simplifi cation’ is one of the signifi cant values of crime reporting, regardless of the type of newspaper (Jewkes 2004). The analysis illustrates how both quality and popular British newspapers employ ‘binary oppositions’ (i.e. a typical feature of simplifi cation), such as good vs. evil, in order to communicate to their audiences the social status of victims and killers and at the same time traditional social values and norms. The employment of ‘binary oppositions’ in noun phrases that introduce and/or classify victims and killers thus enables newspapers to appeal to the public and act, or at least try to act, as moral guardians.

Keywords:
legal discourse; Critical Discourse Analysis; power; pragmatics; sociocognitive approach; presuppositions; implicatures; speech acts; turn-taking sequences
References

Austin, J. L. (1962) How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Clarendon Press.


Atkinson, J. M. and Drew, P. (1979) Order in Court. London: Macmillan.


Danet, B. (1980) ‘Language in the legal process.’ Law and Society Review 14/3, 445-564. https://doi.org/10.2307/3053192


Grice, H. P. (1989) Studies in the Way of Words. MA: Harvard University Press.
Kryk-Kastovsky, B. (2006) ‘Legal Pragmatics.’ In: Brown, K. (ed.) Encyclopedia of
Language and Linguistics. Vol. 7. 2nd ed. Boston: Elsevier. 13-20.


Luchjenbroers, J. (1997) “‘In your own words ...’: Questions and answers in a supreme
court trial.’ Journal of Pragmatics 27/4, 477-503. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0378-2166(96)00033-1


Searle, J. (1975) ‘Indirect speech acts.’ In: Cole, P. and Morgan, J. L. (eds) Syntax and
Semantics 3. New York: Academic Press. 59-82.


Shuy, R. W. (1998) Language of Confession, Interrogation, and Deception. Thousand
Oaks: Sage.

Shuy, R. W. (2004) ‘To testify or not to testify?’ In: Cotterill J. (ed.) Language in the Legal
Process. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 3-18.


Wellman, F. L. (1997) The Art of Cross-Examination. New York: Touchstone.


Wodak, R. and Meyer, M. (2008) Methods for Critical Discourse Analysis. London: Sage.

Metrics

1

Crossref logo

0

468

Views

253

PDF views

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Copyright © 2017 Discourse and Interaction

PDF