Identification of Procedural Acts Performed at the Hearing: Considerations in the Context of the Actual Utterances of Non-professional Participants of Court Proceedings

Abstract

The empirical research of the communication process at the trials which were held in common courts indicated, in particular, that the utterances of trial participants, despite their varied verbal forms, were identified as procedural acts. In addition, these verbal forms were often significantly different from the explicit forms where proper legal terms were used. The aforementioned results of the analysis lead the author to pose the following question: what thought processes (mechanisms) allow for the identification of procedural acts based on the utterances which are not explicit for the performance of these acts. The aim of this paper is to describe these types of mechanisms. The utterances of participants of a trial illustrate the issues taken into consideration in this paper.