Language Power in Attorney’s Leading Questions to Discredit Witness’s Testimonies during Court Trial: A Forensic Linguistic Study

Abstract

The present research is intended to identify how leading questions adopted by attorney who challenges the testimonies provided by the witness during a court trial in a courtroom, namely cross-examination. Furthermore, through these questions, the kinds of linguistic features to build the language power of attorney during examination are also investigated. This issue is essential to be raised since courtroom examination is the most accomplished way to elicit all the significant and required information to provide a clear portrait of a case. It provides the judge a deep knowledge in deciding the final judgment. This research issues one of the phenomenal cases in Michigan regarding the crash between truck driver and police who was died at the moment in 2015. A qualitative descriptive is employed to analyze the data. The result revealed that most of the questions provided by the attorney during a court trial are leading questions through declarative question form. This indicates that the attorney attempts to provide the state of facts with the aim to confirm the information based on his point of view instead of eliciting wider information from the witness’s side. Moreover, the most types of linguistic features that build the attorney’s language power containing in the questions are ‘so’ summary, reformulation, vocabulary landscaping, and evaluative third turn which indicate that he attempts to control the topic of discussion and control witness’s perception toward the issue which leads to the inconsistency ideas. This result can provide a damaging position of the witness since his testimonies can be considered as vulnerable information.