‘Tell Us Only What You Know’: Evidentiality in the Discourse of Participants in Spanish Trials

Abstract

The aim of this proposal is to explore the use of evidentiality in Spanish trials and its relationship with the genre’s conventions and the roles of the participants in these discursive events. To do that, we base our study on a quantitative–qualitative analysis of a transcribed corpus of oral Spanish trials. Evidentiality is a semantic-functional category that includes linguistic devices that mark the source of information behind the speaker’s statements. The explicit marking of the source is not obligatory in Spanish; however, in specific genres (legal, parliamentary, and academic), it becomes a powerful argumentative tool for negotiating the validity of the ideas. We analysed how different participants in the trials made use of evidential expressions. It can be observed that speakers with expert knowledge about the genre conventions (jurists) employed evidentiality differently from the way in which lay participants did. Some differences can be observed at the level of the types of evidentiality. For example, generic inferences and the reporting of laws and scripts are typical of the jurists’ discourse, while lay participants, particularly the witnesses, referred more often to information based on observation. Furthermore, our analysis suggested that jurists were more likely to exploit evidential constructions for argumentative or strategic purposes. For example, logical reasoning based on presumably known or shared information can be used to downgrade the speaker’s commitment or to mitigate and attenuate disagreement.