19. Legal discourse: processes of making evidence in specialised legal corpora

Abstract

Questioning has often been the focus of institutional legal discourse research across the domains of police interviews and courtroom interaction both in terms of the institutional participants and the lay respondents (e.g. Drew 1992; Archer 2005; Newbury and Johnson 2006; Tracy and Parks 2012). Though we know much about question design and evidence construction and negotiation from this work, there is more to be learned from cross-domain corpus-based research, particularly in the area of reported speech and quoting in legal discourse. This chapter focuses on pragmatic uses of the verb SAY in police interviewing and cross-examination discourse, using large specialised corpora. Combining insights from previous research on reported speech (Matoesian 2000; Galatolo 2007) in legal discourse and using a cross-corpus approach, we look at how actions of settling on agreed and contested evidential facts are accomplished. We see how patterns of use with SAY are linked to a range of institutional activities: arguing and stance making, doubting and rejecting, time-shifting and framing, which constitute professional activities of shifting and fixing states of knowledge against legal and moral discourses. Construction, acceptance and denial of the verbal “facts” is given “intertextual authority” (Matoesian 2000) by institutional participants: judges and lawyers.