Description
Court proceedings typically rely on depositions of witnesses and interrogations of suspects for the discovery of evidence and case decision-making. In the case of earlier depositions prior to the trial, the witnesses’ or suspects’ statements are usually presented and incorporated in the trial in written entextualised form and become as such recontextualised in the trial’s discursive environment. During the trial, courtroom depositions and interrogations are also typically simultaneously committed to paper by courtroom scribes. As such, witness and suspect statements are of crucial importance and omnipresent in courtroom cases, and this is the case for both historical and contemporary court proceedings.In this paper, we introduce the historical Witnesses corpus gathered at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (www.getuigenissen.org), which encompasses eighteenth and nineteenth century witness depositions and suspect interrogations used in trial cases held at Flemish courts. In doing so, we will present examples from the corpus to illustrate both the practice of disposition and interrogation as well as the legal scribes’ practices of entextualisation in historical Flemish courtrooms, with an empirical focus on documents from the Bruges region and cases related to violent crimes (e.g. (attempted) murder, arson and sexual assault).
In addition to an introduction to the Witnesses corpus, we will also present initial results of a case study of 152 documents in sexual assault cases. The presented analysis is part of a PhD project which aims to shed more light on the language of legal proceedings and the institutional discourse from a diachronic perspective. Adopting both a qualitative and quantitative approach, we investigate the general structure of the depositions (including examples of formulaic language which are displayed throughout the documents as well as the depositions’ distinctive features and the components they consist of). Additionally, we aim to address the basic questions regarding the written sources’ credibility in reflecting the spoken interaction of the actual interrogation. In order to do that, we focus on (among others) orality markers, implicit meanings and questioning strategies (understood as ways of introducing questions and information). The results of this analysis will be framed against the background of the entextualisation process during the trial case’s proceeding.
| Periode | 29 jun 2021 |
|---|---|
| Evenementstitel | 17th International Pragmatics Conference |
| Evenementstype | Conference |
| Conferentienummer | 17 |
| Locatie | Winterthur, Switzerland |
| Mate van erkenning | International |