But, you see, the problem is …Perception verbs in courtroom talk: Focus onyou see

Abstract

This article seeks to contribute to the body of research on the use of perception verbs in interaction and, more specifically, to enhance the understanding of how participants in courtroom proceedings exploit you see to manage the discourse as it unfolds and to negotiate stance. Against the background of earlier work on vision words in interaction, the study looks at parenthetical and non-parenthetical you see to reveal both perceptual and cognitive uses, and to identify their local pragmatic effect. As the analysis indicates, in the data at hand, lexical you see is more readily recruited than non-lexical you see, and it is found chiefly in grammatical and declarative questions. At the same time, it is the clause-initial you see that visibly brings out the epistemic tensions between the speakers and serves to contest the addressee’s position. The study corroborates the claim that you see is an argumentative marker, whose meaning (and force) depends on its formal properties (position, complementation) and the relationship between the speakers.

The pragmatic functions of ‘respect’ in lawyers' courtroom discourse: A case study of Brexit hearings

“…This measure revealed that respect, respectful and respectfully occurred 16, 128 and 2,048 times more frequently in our corpus than in the Spoken BNC2014. 5 In focusing on one word or lemma as a means of analysing pragmatic patterns in a large corpus of courtroom discourse, this paper follows an emerging trend in the field, with well (Tkacukova 2015), now (Claridge 2018), you see (Szczyrbak 2019) and but (Lutzky 2019) having all recently been used for this purpose.…”