This study examines the discursive history and interactive aspects of the opening statement in Anglo-American courts. Informed by the concepts of stance and engagement, the study explicates the process of conceptual interaction which turns the jurors into co-constructors of the discourse, thereby making the opening statement fictively dialogic. Drawing upon 51 opening statements as recorded in Proceedings of the Old Bailey, between 1759 and 1789, the qualitative and quantitative analysis reveals that interactive devices are an integral part of the genre, and that pronouns appear to occur most frequently, followed by the lawyers’ use of attitude markers, questions, and reported discourse, respectively. With these devices, the lawyers are likely to be able to prime the jury into viewing the events and participants in a given direction.

Based on the definition of "tense" and "aspect", this review paper intends to compare and analyze the similarities and differences between Arabic and English tense and aspect categories in terms of their forms, functions and usage. Moreover, in the current review paper, I propose comparison and analysis that account for tense and aspect categories in Arabic and English. The comparison and analysis are based on the qualitative method which depends solely on the recent and previous research works. In addition, the comparison and analysis assume that there is a great deal of differences in tense and aspect categories in Arabic and English in terms of their forms, functions and usage. Furthermore, Arabic views temporality through aspectual distinctions of perfective category versus imperfective category. On the other hand, English expresses temporality through various verbal tense and aspect categories.

Underpinned by the assumption that social categorizations emerge from discursive practices performed within the interactional context, this study examines the discursive process in which an expert witness constructs and negotiates persuasive courtroom accounts. Using insights from the concept of 'footing' and the framework of stance and engagement, this study reveals the ways in which an expert witness calls upon a range of interactional devices to appropriate the desired footing and labeling category. The findings suggest that instead of asserting their dominance and expertise over the interlocutors, experts construct and negotiate their identity by aligning with other participants and establishing a relationship with them. All this is done within the broad constraints of courtroom discourse.

This paper invites the reader to revisit the accused individuals’ response strategies in the Salem witchcraft trials from the perspective of pragmatic politeness. However, politeness, as used in this paper, refers to politeness to self, for the sake of one’s face — a concept that is different from, yet not incompatible with, that of Brown and Levinson (1987). The paper argues that it is more realistic to examine the trials from this perspective because the accused’s responses were in part driven by “what they thought others thought of them”, which is part of their “face”. As many as nineteen sub-strategies of self-politeness were found to be in operation. Such self-politeness strategies were critical in these trials because they helped the accused to achieve two goals: first, they could defend themselves, and, second, at the same time that the responses might have led them to being acquitted or to a partial and more lenient punishment (although it could not be guaranteed that the responses would work to a satisfactory end), the accused were able to enhance or restore, to a certain degree, their tarnished public image.

This investigation examines the interactional dimension of the preface section of an early form of news discourse. Informed by the framework of metadiscourse and incorporating insights from the study of stance and evaluation, this study explicates the ways in which the witchcraft pamphleteers strategically structured and designed the texts to secure readers' agreement through conceptual interaction. Differences in the selection of metadiscourse contributed to different writer identities and reflected generic conventions that occurred over time.Abstract: This paper provides an analysis of heteroglossic mass-mediated discourse for a National Public Radio (NPR) segment. Two Chicago teenagers covered the story of five-year-old Eric Morse, who was pushed to his death from a fourteenth-story housing project window. On a micro-discursive level, each voice represented in this segment is an amalgamated blend of lived experiences with respect to this tragedy and the events surrounding it, as well as participation in speech chains of mass-communicative, historical, and segmental natures. While presented as a documentary examining a major news event in depth through "authentic" correspondents, this segment is edited and packaged to appeal to a certain demographic makeup. Macrosociological constructs of race, class, and social position are reflected in these highly localized discourses as these experiences are edited and "packaged" for a specific listening audience.