The development of an artefactual language ideology: Utterance, event, and agency in the metadiscourse of the excited utterance exception to hearsay

Abstract

In this paper I argue that a particular type of Anglo-American legal discourse treats spoken language as a text artifact and discuss the effects on the person to whom the text artifact is attributed. I do this by historicizing the language ideology that generally prohibits the use of hearsay in in-court testimony, but admits ‘excited utterances,’ or declarations made spontaneously in response to an event ‘startling enough to cause nervous excitement’ ( Haggins vs. Warden, Fort Pillow State Farm, 1984, p. 1057). The language ideology mobilized and circulated in this discourse assumes that some utterances are by their very nature artefactual, and as artifacts, they are the property of the event, not the speaker. This rule and language ideology have roots in early modern English common law. I trace the history of this language ideology back through the definitions of the excited utterance exception to hearsay, historically called the spontaneous exclamation exception. This particular discourse highlights the ways ideas about language are historically saturated, the ways that history is embedded in metadiscourses, and the effects of metadiscursive evaluation on the people whose utterances are in question.