Resumen de tesis doctoral: PASCUAL, E. Imaginary Trialogues: Conceptual Blending and Fictive Interaction in Criminal Courts.

[Carlos Subirats]

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Resumen de tesis doctoral:
PASCUAL, Esther. 2003. Imaginary Trialogues: Conceptual Blending and
Fictive Interaction in Criminal Courts.
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1. Autora:
PASCUAL, Esther

2. Título de la tesis:
Imaginary Trialogues: Conceptual Blending and Fictive Interaction in
Criminal Courts.

2.1 Número de páginas: 308
2.2 Palabras clave: courtroom interaction, cognitive semantics,
conversation frame, fictive interaction, fictive trialogues.

3. Fecha de lectura o defensa: January 2003

4. Departamento, centro o laboratorio en el que se ha desarrollado
Free University Amsterdam, The Netherlands

5. Directores:
Prof. Theo A.J.M. Janssen (Free University Amsterdam)
Prof. Aaron V. Cicourel (University of California, San Diego)
Dr. Frederike van der Leek (University of Amsterdam).

6. Proyecto o línea de investigación en el que se incluye


7. Resumen e índice

In everyday life, we primarily use language in intersubjective
communication. Trivial as this statement may seem, the precise ways in
which this affects our conceptualization of experience as well as the
language system and the way it is used are far from clear. This
dissertation examines the issue, and thus concentrates on the
intersection between language, interaction, and cognition. The focus
is on a phenomenon – never before studied as such – which I call
fictive interaction. This constitutes the use of the schematic
interactional structure of ordinary communication as an organizing
frame to understand, think, and talk about verbal as well as
non-verbal entities, processes, and relationships. Different levels of
human communication are explored, from the overall situation of
interaction to the discourse and the discourse content, down to the
levels of the individual sentence, the clause, the phrase, and the
lexical item.

Empirically, this work is mainly based on an ethnographic case study
of a high-profile California murder trial, a fragment of which appears
transcribed and commented in a 35-page appendix. The dissertation also
uses fieldwork and audiovisual data from four criminal trials in
Spain, which occurred shortly after the introduction of the jury
system. In order to be able to make generalizations to different
languages and language genres, the thesis included discussion of
English, Spanish, Catalan, and Dutch examples – both creative and
conventionalized ones – from different contexts. The theoretical
framework followed is the cognitive linguistics theory of conceptual
blending (Fauconnier & Turner), enriched with Hutchins's concept of
distributed cognition, which adds a socio-cultural dimension to the
network.

The dissertation first describes the general cognitive mechanisms
underlying legal and non-legal language and communication, then
presents the interactional dynamics of the courtroom, and subsequently
discusses the way in which the conceptualization of the court's
interactional channels may model conceptual, communicative, and
linguistic structures in litigation. The conclusions are then
generalized to non-institutionalized language in different genres.

Chapter 1 introduces the cognitive linguistics assumption that much of
natural thought and language relies on mental imagery and fictivity,
that is, on the departure from the direct or objective
conceptualization and description of actuality. I then introduce and
define fictive interaction as a type of 'fictive reality' that is
equally critical in the understanding of cognition and language
structure and use – in and outside the courtroom – as factual
interaction. The thesis makes a call for merging cognitive semantics,
communicative pragmatics and ethnography in the study of courtroom
interaction (and ordinary interaction, for that matter). Chapter 2
applies this interdisciplinary approach by analyzing the cognitive
semantics of discourse data from Spanish and American trials. One of
the claims is that the study of fictivity and cognition can help us
better understand law and litigation.

Chapter 3 discusses the crucial role of verbal communication in court
and the different interactional patterns of Western litigation. It is
suggested that in the adversary system communication is generally
non-co-operative, since a trial is not so much 'a search for the
truth' as 'a battle for sympathy.' This idea is embodied in a type of
fictive interaction said to schematically represent the basic
interactional channel and participant structure of Western jury
trials. This involves: i) the communicator who wants to convince (i.e.
the litigator); ii) the evaluator to be convinced (i.e. the judge
and/or the jury); and iii) the adversary to be refuted (i.e. the
opposed party). Such a fictive trialogue is claimed to operate
independently of the courtroom's factual, observable interactional
structure. Regardless of their factual addressee(s), the words of
litigators are typically meant to persuade the ultimate evaluator of
their theory of the case, and by so doing, counter-attack their
opponent, whom they cannot address directly during trial.

Chapter 4 tackles the frequent occurrence and persuasive power of
fictive trialogues in American and Spanish litigation. The overall
socio-cultural event of the trial is suggested to be conceptualised by
participants as a fictive debate between the two parties to convince
the judge/jury. Similarly, trial communicative sequences (e.g.
direct-, cross-examination; closing argument, closing argument
rebuttal) are construed as fictive trialogues in which a set of
question-answer interactions or monologues are conceptualised as one
or a series of conversational turns in a fictive 'war of words'
between the two parties for the sake of the judge/jury. Also, each
(apparent) legal monologue (i.e. opening statement, closing argument)
or dialogue (i.e. witness testimony) is conceptually a trialogue,
since it appears as a counter-argument to a prior or expected future
argument by the other side and is ultimately addressed towards the
evaluator(s). Finally, legal discourse often uses metaphorical images
of imaginary trialogues, such as that of a (deceased) murder victim
testifying before the judge/jury against the defendant's claims.

Chapter 5 examines fictive interaction (with or without a triadic
structure) in language structure and use. The claim is that the
pattern of factual face-to-face interaction can model fictive
interaction at the levels of the sentence, the clause, the phrase, and
the lexical item. Examples of sentence-level fictive interactions
prompting a fictive trialogue are rhetorical questions (e.g. "Why
would she let him do that?", p. 184; "¿Quién no sufre por problemas
económicos? […] Yo se lo dire,…" p. 189) and leading questions overtly
answered by the utterer (e.g. "Is the defendant that fraudulent? Well,
yeah", p. 153). It is shown that rhetorical questions and other
interactional structures can appear as clauses and thus that imaginary
trialogues can be embedded (e.g. "This means that how could this
person ever do this!?", p. 197; "Express malice means was it an
intentional killing?", p. 198). Fictive interaction constituents –
including trialogic ones – can also function as noun modifiers,
sharing thereby syntactic features with phrases (e.g. "top 'not
guilty' lawyers", p. 213, "a who's buried in Grant's tomb? argument",
p. 214). They can also show a predicative use, as in the Catalan
examples "una feina que és m'agrada aquesta feina" [a job that is I
like this job] and the conventionalized "Això va ser campi qui pugui"
[This was let he who can get out of here] (p. 195, 218). Finally, the
internal structure of a lexical item can prompt some sort of (dialogic
or trialogic) interaction between fictive participants in legal
language (e.g. "a whodunit", "the Three Strikes and You're Out", p.
224) as well as in ordinary language, both in Eglish (e.g.
"forget-me-not(s)," "not-in-my-back-yarder(s)," p. 217) and in Spanish
(e.g. "corre-ve-y-dile," "pordiosero(s)", p. 223-224).

The thesis concludes that: a) courtroom interaction can be regarded as
the node in which interactional, (sub)cultural and cognitive patterns
are manifested; b) litigation is a triadic 'war of words' in which the
evaluator's sympathy towards the victim vs. the defendant is
negotiated; c) imaginary trialogues, i.e. fictive interaction with
trilogic structure, can profitably be used by litigators and
persuaders in general as effective argumentative devices; d) fictive
interaction plays a crucial role in the conceptualization of
experience and the organization of language structure and use both in
legal and in non-legal settings; e) the internal structure of language
not only reflects its semantic aspect, but also its interactional
dimension and communicative function; and f) cognitive linguistics and
linguistics in general can benefit much from the study of properly
contextualized naturalistic data gathered through in-depth fieldwork.

This study should be of interest to anyone interested in pragmatics,
communication, American and Spanish courtroom interaction, and the
conceptual structure and linguistic expression of fictive realities.
More generally, it should interest anyone concerned with the
interrelations between language structure and use, social interaction,
and cognition within a given socio-cultural context.


8. Correo-e del autor:
e [punto] pascual [arroba] let [punto] vu [punto] nl
Web de la autora: http://www.let.vu.nl/staf/e.pascual/index_en.htm


9. Cómo obtener la tesis:
Se puede descargar en PDF desde:
http://www.lotpublications.nl/publish/issues/Pascual/index.html


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