Strategic lexicalization in courtroom discourse: A corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis

Abstract

This paper adopts a corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis approach to explore the pragmatics of lexical categories in courtroom discourse. More specifically, this paper probes the extent to which courtroom interlocutors employ particular lexemes to achieve specific pragmatic purposes, which, in turn, contributes to understanding the way language operates effectively within legal settings. The data used is taken from the testimony of former American President William Clinton during his impeachment trial for the ‘Monica Lewinsky Affair’. The analytical focus is on 17 lexemes representing four lexical categories, namely nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs, by highlighting their frequency distribution in the testimony and revealing their significance as conduits for particular pragmatic meanings. Two main findings are revealed in this paper: first, within particular contexts, lexical categories are not only content knowledge units but also pragmatic meaning carriers whose functions go beyond their most commonly-used semantic sense. These pragmatic functions include information confirmation, verification, elicitation, dissociation, uncertainty, and clarification. Second, applying a corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis approach to the study of courtroom discourse contributes to contextualizing the linguistic analysis of the use of language in courtrooms and offers a more functionally based discussion of the pragmatic use of language in legal settings.