A corpus-assisted study of the discourse markerwellas an indicator of judges' institutional roles in court cases with litigants in person

Abstract

The article concentrates on court cases with litigants in person (lay people who act on their own behalf in legal proceedings without a counsel or solicitor) and discusses the challenges of building a corpus of courtroom discourse where it is crucial to distinguish between speakers due to their distinct institutional roles. The corpus incorporates seven sub-corpora of verbatim transcripts from different court cases with litigants in person and comprises over 11 million tokens. The focus of the article is on the interplay between the legal and lay discourse types and how judges project their institutional roles through 'well'-initiated turns directed at litigants in person and counsels. As a versatile discourse marker, 'well' provides a good opportunity to explore how judges have to adapt their roles to ensure lay litigants in person receive the necessary support and that their lack of competence does not impede on the fairness of the proceedings. Given the breadth and importance of the topic of litigation in person, the article discusses how the tools and approaches of corpus linguistics can be helpful in this multi-disciplinary area where multiple functions and uses of individual linguistic features need to be explored in depth.

Serving the Public Good?—A Corpus-Assisted Discourse Analysis of Private Prisons and For-Profit Incarceration in the United States

“…A meta-analysis by Nartey and Mwinlaaru (2019) has shown that corpus-assisted approaches are frequently used in linguistics, and yet they identify a lack of such research "in the allied field of critical genre analysis and forensic contexts as well (as) those of contrastive/intercultural rhetoric, narrative inquiry/analysis, mediated discourse analysis, and conversation analysis have hardly been engaged" (p. 19, my emphasis). Thus, the present paper aims at contributing to the extant literature in the area of corpus-assisted discourse analysis in forensic contexts (e.g., Coulthard, 1994;Kredens, 2002;Cotterill, 2003;Heffer, 2005;Gruber, 2014;Felton Rosulek, 2015;Gales, 2015;Tkacuková, 2015;Wright, 2021), and it is also the first one, to my knowledge, to address the language of private prison corporations in the United States.…”

Questioning and answering strategies in Malaysian criminal proceedings

“…In recent years, there has been an increasing interest among linguists to use a corpus-based approach (e.g. Cotterill, 2003;Archer, 2005;Heffer, 2005;Johnson, 2014Johnson, , 2015Tkačuková, 2015) for the macro and micro analysis of courtroom interaction. Despite this encouraging phenomenon, there has been very little quantitative work conducted on questions in courtroom interaction, due to the methodological challenges, such as inaccessibility of sufficiently large amounts of data and technology (e.g.…”

“…On the micro level, various studies look at the illocutionary force (Cotterill, 2003), discourse markers (Hale, 1999;Tkačuková, 2015) and metalinguistic markers (Heffer, 2005) that accompany questions. Although these markers may or may not carry "propositional content" (Hale, 1999: 59), they are important to express a speaker's intention in their utterance.…”

Communication in family court: financial remedy proceedings from the perspective of litigants in person

“…Research directly dealing with linguistic aspects of litigation in person is limited to two short studies on small claims courts (O'Barr and Conley, 1990;Conley and O'Barr, 1998) and research conducted by the author (Tkacukova, 2010(Tkacukova, , 2011(Tkacukova, , 2015. The first two studies deal with narrative devices used by self-represented litigants in the USA and conclude that lay people present narratives common in everyday conversations and therefore produce relational accounts instead of rule-oriented accounts required for the purposes of courts (e.g.…”

“…This influences the role of judges who often have to explain common legal concepts, such as 'evidence', 'opening speech', or 'cross-examination' to lay people. In Tkacukova (2015), the most frequent function judges performed when talking to LiPs was to provide explanation or suggestions on procedural matters and legal concepts. Difficulties faced by lay people inadvertently complicate the role of the court staff, the other parties' legal representatives and judges.…”