31.2794, Calls: Pragmatics, Socioling/Switzerland
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LINGUIST List: Vol-31-2794. Tue Sep 15 2020. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.
Subject: 31.2794, Calls: Pragmatics, Socioling/Switzerland
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Date: Tue, 15 Sep 2020 12:14:29
From: Rik Vosters [Rik.Vosters at vub.be]
Subject: The making of an (in)credible witness and suspect: historical and contemporary perspectives on the discursive-pragmatic characteristics of testimonial accounts
Full Title: The making of an (in)credible witness and suspect: historical and contemporary perspectives on the discursive-pragmatic characteristics of testimonial accounts
Date: 27-Jun-2021 - 02-Jul-2021
Location: Winterthur, Switzerland
Contact Person: Mieke Vandenbroucke
Meeting Email: mieke.vandenbroucke at uantwerpen.be
Web Site: http://www.historicalsociolinguistics.be/thematic-panel-the-making-of-an-incredible-witness-and-suspect/
Linguistic Field(s): Pragmatics; Sociolinguistics
Call Deadline: 25-Oct-2020
Meeting Description:
Convenors:
Mieke Vandenbroucke (Universiteit Antwerpen) & Rik Vosters (Vrije Universiteit
Brussel)
Both historical and contemporary legal procedures rely on statements by
witnesses and suspects given both in-court and in previous police
investigations as evidence in case decision-making. Such testimonies and
depositions are typically shaped by complex co-construction by the
interlocutors, while written accounts used in court are the outcome of
transformative entextualisation processes (Andrus 2006; Grund 2007; Park &
Bucholtz 2009). In this panel, we investigate such contemporary and historical
accounts in trial proceedings, witness depositions and interrogation reports,
using the present to explain the past (cf. Labov 1975), while simultaneously
exploring what historical accounts can contribute to our understanding of
present-day meaning making processes in testimonies.
Contemporary studies have documented how oral witness and suspect accounts
come into existence through spoken question-answer sequences between
interlocutors, and are shaped by a variety of questioning and answering
techniques in direct and cross-examination, where meaning and evidence are
negotiated through interaction (Komter 2006; Seung-Lee 2013). These encounters
are power-differentiated and often highly conflictual interactions, fraught
with skilful manipulation of pragma-linguistic resources (e.g. visual
evidentials, marked pronominal constructions) to elicit relevant evidence and
influence the court’s perception of the speaker’s identity and reliability of
their testimony (Matoesian 2001).
Moreover, contemporary research has documented how the drafting process of the
written account by the interrogator introduces changes to what the witness
orally stated, for instance removing turn-taking through first-person accounts
(Komter 2006), or filtering out hesitations and unintelligible utterances
(Gallez & Maryns 2014; Rock 2001).
Historically, there is clear evidence that courtroom scribes similarly
represented speech events by defendants in an unreliable fashion, making such
evidence unsuited for correlational sociolinguistic analyses (Grund 2007), but
opening up the possibility for historical pragmatic analyses of how
entexualisation processes varied by context and evolved over time. Such
discursive steering and transformative processes in turn heavily influence
both how information is uncovered as evidence (Archer 2002), and how
witnesses’ and suspects’ identities and credibility is construed to the court
(Vartiainen 2017): elements such as the use of direct speech, for instance,
are presented as markers of credibility and authenticity, even though witness
testimonies are notoriously unreliable in representing the spoken word
(Giordano 2012; Kytö & Walker 2003).
In this panel, we welcome papers which engage with testimonies in witness
depositions, interrogation reports, or other similar courtroom or legal data,
either from a contemporary or a historical perspective. We particularly
welcome work focusing on the various pragmatic and textual features which
shape the credibility of courtroom actors such as witnesses, suspects or
experts, in either the oral account or written representation. We aim to
achieve a mix of invited and submitted papers by senior and novice researchers
working with historical and present-day data, and explicitly invite all
participants to reflect on how we can use contemporary pragmatic research to
further our understanding of historical pragmatic analyses of witness accounts
by uncovering parallel linguistic and pragmatic behaviour and practices.
Call for Papers:
All abstracts (300-500 words) will have to be submitted individually through
the IPrA website:
https://ipra2021.exordo.com/
Deadline: 25 October 2020
Feel free to get in touch with us before that if you want advice on your
abstract, or if you have any questions related to the panel
(mieke.vandenbroucke at uantwerpen.be; Rik.Vosters at vub.be).
Please prepare your abstract according to the IPrA call for papers &
submission guidelines (https://pragmatics.international/page/CfP), and make
sure to select “The making of an (in)credible witness and suspect” as the
panel for your submission.
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