Boiling Down to the M‐Word at the California Supreme Court

Abstract

This article examines oral arguments in a seminal case before the California Supreme Court about same‐sex couples' right to marry. Working with video of the proceeding, from which I captured images and made transcripts, I propose that participants used certain pragmatic displays—in particular, gesture, metaphor, and prosody—as metapragmatic devices simultaneously to advance their shared task of legal categorizing and to position themselves and one another as winners, losers, and bystanders. Participants integrated these displays multimodally with their words in order to make arguments as well as to repurpose arguments made in preceding turns. The article contributes to the literature on stance‐taking and format‐tying techniques and also contributes to the literature on the construction of social identity through courtroom interaction. In particular, it demonstrates that the deployment of this repertoire to help achieve stances inside the courtroom also helped project those stances outward to competing social views on sexual orientation.