Now in the historical courtroom

Claudia Claridge

doi:10.1075/jhp.00020.cla

Abstract

Abstract The investigation of the pragmatic marker now in trial proceedings from 1560 to 1800 shows a genre-specific usage profile with regard to its uses and functions. Courtroom “professionals” (lawyers, judges and other officials) use now significantly more frequently than lay speakers (witnesses, victims and defendants). The former use it to segment and highlight stages in the argumentation, as well as to control and to disalign with others’ interactive behaviour. Self-defending litigants share these functional preferences to some extent, while all other lay persons use now for structuring their answers and dominantly in direct-speech contexts. Now in professional legal speech thus functions as a strategic metapragmatic framing strategy.

Highlights

Fraser’s (1996: 169) general characterisation of pragmatic markers as “the linguistically encoded clues which signal the speaker’s potential communicative intentions” holds for all of them, they may specialise for certain genres, styles and effects
Pragmatic now is not a frequent phenomenon in the historical courtroom, it seems fairly stable over time and could be even said to gain in prominence as waning uses of temporal make it seem relatively more common
The frequency of in Corpus of English Dialogues (CED) is low, the general types found in CED correspond almost exactly with those found in the much larger OBC

Summary

Introduction

Fraser’s (1996: 169) general characterisation of pragmatic markers as “the linguistically encoded clues which signal the speaker’s potential communicative intentions” holds for all of them, they may specialise for certain genres, styles and effects. With regard to Aijmer (2002: 69) suggests that it prefers more formal, structured and public speech interactions, as it is more frequently found in such contexts in the London-Lund Corpus.. Courtroom speech is formal, public and it has a strict genre-specific structure based on a highly asymmetric question-answer pattern – one might expect it to be one of the contexts that favours the occurrence of pragmatic now. Face-to-face and phone conversations: 4.5 and 10.9 occurrences per 10,000 words; debates, interviews and spoken commentary: 15.5 to 18.9

Objectives

Results

Conclusion