Description
This paper explores the use of persuasive and argumentative strategies (Biber 1988, Biber 1995, Crespo-García 2011) and their role in the construction of the speakers’ credibility in an institutional setting. In doing so, it adopts a diachronic perspective and investigates documents from a corpus of 18th- and 19th-century witness depositions and suspect interrogations used in trial cases held at Flemish courts. The documents contain originally speech-based depositions committed to paper by legal scribes. They are presented and incorporated in the trial in written entextualized form and became as such recontextualized in the trial’s discursive environment. They often become central pieces of evidence as the court proceedings rely on them in the case decision making. Drawing on Biber’s Multidimensional Analysis (1988), we investigate selected persuasion markers used to denote argumentative discourse (for example modal verbs, suasive verbs and conditional subordinators) and we frame our findings against the background of source credibility (McCroskey & Young 1981, Whitehead 1968). We adopt both a micro- and a macroscopic perspective: on the one hand, we aim to discover habitual patterns of use and link them to selected sociolinguistic predictors (such as age, sex and role) in order to describe strategies employed by the speakers and groups of speakers on a large scale to persuade the judge and establish their credibility. On the other hand, we investigate linguistic choices made by individuals and analyze them in the context of specific cases. As a result, we hope to contribute to the (socio)linguistic understanding of credibility in the historical and institutional contexts and arrive at a more fine-grained picture of how credibility was constructed in Flemish courtroom proceedings in the 18th and 19th century.| Period | 2 Jun 2022 |
|---|---|
| Event title | Macro and Micro Perspectives in Historical Sociolinguistics: HiSoN 2022 |
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Murcia, SpainShow on map |