American courtroom discourse

Abstract

Since the twentieth century, information has become a particularly powerful tool of influence in all realms of human activities. The sender of the speech seeks to influence their recipients by all available means, both lingual and non-lingual. For this reason, we have placed special emphasis on psychological phenomena that help the speech author to succeed in court. One of such seminal psychological phenomena is transgression. Notwithstanding a thorough study of this issue, we have not come across any studies of courtroom discourse dealing with this phenomenon. While exploring the texts of the prosecutors` and defense attorneys` speeches we applied contextual and linguo-stylistic analyses as well as intent and discourse analysis methods.Based on such findings, transgression in courtroom discourse is used simultaneously to erase bounds, on the one hand, and to create hype and epatage, on the other. It is created with the help of lexical means mostly which can be either invective directly or become invective in the context.