Abstract
The view of discourse as serving transactional and interactional purposes cascades into practical realities in courtroom exchanges. As an institutional setting, the law courts exemplify a typical social domain where language provides the basis for conveying information; promoting meaningful and goal-directive social and interactional exchanges. Whether in civil or criminal litigations, the proceedings rely on linguistic facilities for accomplishing communicative actions. Language thus remains the sole ‘legal tender’ and the major instrument for prosecuting the cases and resolving conflicts brought before the courts. This paper is motivated by the increasing but interesting challenges lay participants face in the courtrooms as they are confronted with language use that is different from their day-to-day experiences. The study discusses these peculiar communicative interactions in a law court in Lagos, Nigeria against the backdrop of very little efforts in courtroom discourse in non-native English speaking contexts. Specifically, this paper focuses mainly on an aspect of courtroom discourse (i.e. examination-in-chief ), a procedural questioning session which provides the basis for presenting the plaintiff’s arguments and information through the plaintiff’s counsel. The data used in this work were drawn from a civil suit filed in a Lagos High Court by a complainant in connection with a dispute on a property in central Lagos. Using insights from discourse analysis and theoretical construct based on Genre Analysis (e.g. Hasan’s Generic Structure Potential) as well as other relevant constructs, the study analyses discourse features and strategies deployed by active participants in the proceedings. The study finds that legal proceedings contextualized within a given L 2 sociolinguistic and lingual-legal jurisdiction helps to project some of the peculiar features of a non-native English in legal domains. Apart from identifying some peculiar discourse patterns that are institutional-based, courtroom proceedings in this legal culture demonstrates discourse strategies that conflate with similar features in other jurisdictions. That only supports the belief of a common source for most legal systems with colonial experiences as well as the universal applicability of judicial decisions. The complex natures of legal texts that are highlighted merely corroborate previous works in this area. The study concludes by demonstrating how language is used to perform actions that are goal-directive in this domain using the Speech Act model.
Highlights
One of the functions of language as a social activity is that it lends itself as an instrument of resolving conflict that may arise from day to day human interactions
The actual interactions between the counsel to the plaintiff, the counsel to the defendant as well the role of the judges were closely monitored in order to unveil and understand the discourse strategies adopted during court proceedings in Nigeria
This study has shown that the courtroom as an institutionalized communicative context is a typical ‘market place of ideas’ where transactions and exchanges are done through the use of well-structured and conventionalized mode of discourse
Summary
One of the functions of language as a social activity is that it lends itself as an instrument of resolving conflict that may arise from day to day human interactions. Vol 1 No 5; September 2012 [Special Issue on General Linguistics] Legal institutions all over the world play a very important role in social reengineering and social restructuring Apart from their constitutional roles of interpreting the laws of the land and adjudicating in issues and cases that may arise from the application of these laws, the most socially-relevant function that directly affect the lives of the average citizens is conflict resolution. Discourse features unique to the linguistic interactions in this genre of legal discourse; examining the different strategies that the text depends on as discourse and how these assist in accomplishing the goals of the discourse and the legal institution in general. Both linguistic and discourse approaches will be relied on in the course of investigating the text which will be examined in terms of discourse features and strategies, generic properties, features of context among others
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