Speaking up in Court: Repair and Powerless Language in New Zealand Courtrooms

Abstract

Law courts purport to be seats of justice, yet there is constant debate about the evenhandedness of that justice and ordinary people's access to it. This thesis reports on a study of seven criminal hearings in the District Court in Auckland, New Zealand.The study focussed on repair (as defined in conversation analysis) and various phenomena which have been identified previously as characteristic of "powerless language" (that is, the speech used by those in subordinate positions to their social superiors). These phenomena included hesitations, hedges, intensifiers, witnesses asking questions, tag questions, high rising terminal intonation, polite terms, terms of address and well. Chapter One: Introduction Goal of this studySpeaking up in court is far from being an equal and clearly understood business. In spite of a commonly held perception in New Zealand that its justice system is the fairest possible, there are many ways in which it is inherently not equally available to and effective for everybody. Not least among these are the adversarial nature of the court system and matters of institutional bias, which are well-known and widely discussed, including by the legal fraternity.However, little or no attention has been given in New Zealand to the question of how language affects what happens in court. Language has been seen as merely a vehicle for arriving at legal decisions, for deciding disputes, and for dispensing justice. Indeed it acts in all these ways, and, it is assumed, very effectively.On the other hand, linguists have been looking for some time now at how language affects what happens in the courtroom. They have studied such areas as the effect that a defendant's or a witness's language has on juries' perceptions of them, and the effect that their narrative style can have on judges, as well as looking at the effects of lexical choices. In New Zealand, for example, Lane (1988) has done an in-depth study of the kinds of questions asked in Auckland district courtrooms. These studies have used a number of approaches, including ethnography of speaking, research on attitudes, and syntactic and semantic analysis.The goal of this study is to investigate the widely held view that a great deal of misunderstanding occurs in court, and to do so using the approaches outlined below in order to arrive at a comprehensive analysis. The beginning hypothesis was that, if misunderstanding is occurring in court, it may do so along not only inter-ethnic lines, but also along gender, power and professional/lay dimensions. Investigating this perception has involved looking at two broad strands of material in the data. The first of these is repair. It is perhaps obvious to suggest that repair is where we would find evidence of misunderstandings in court, whatever their underlying causes. Therefore the occurrence, functions and resolution of repair are considered, as well as the matter of who initiates the repairs in the data. It turns out that neither ethnographic factors nor power provide satisfactory ways to account for the o...

Marcela Alina Fărcașiu, Language in the Courtroom: A Comparative Study of American and Romanian Criminal Trials, Casa Cărții de Știință, Cluj-Napoca, 2015, 302 p.

“…The language used in the courtroom has been studied for more than 30 years, and has been approached from several perspectives, such as linguistic (Maley, 1994), sociolinguistic (Cotterill, 2001), pragmatic (Danet, 1980), stylistic (O' Barr, 1982) or anthropological (Conley et al, 2005). Focus has been paid also to the cultural particularities and differences in the courtrooms by researchers such as Martinovski (2001), Innes (2001), Eades (2002) and de Klerk (2003), to mention just a few.…”

Marcela Alina Fărcașiu, Language in the Courtroom: A Comparative Study of American and Romanian Criminal Trials, Casa Cărții de Știință, Cluj-Napoca, 2015, 302 p.

“…Limbajul folosit în sala de judecată se studiază de mai bine de 30 de ani, fiind abordat din mai multe perspective, precum lingvistică (Maley, 1994), sociolingvistică (Cotterill, 2001), pragmatică (Danet, 1980), stilistică (O' Barr, 1982) sau antropologică (Conley et al, 2005). Particularitățile și diferențele culturale din sălile de judecată au fost, de asemenea, în centru atenției unor cercetătorii precum, amintind doar cîțiva dintre ei, Martinovski (2001), Innes (2001), Eades (2002) și de Klerk (2003).…”