Courtroom Discourse in the Witness Examination

Over the last three decades, legal language and courtroom discourse have been the centre of great scholarly interest. Many studies have focused on the analysis of trial as a legal genre, however research on the Public Inquiry is very limited. Moreover, even in the few contributions available, none considers this proceeding in a genre perspective. This book, therefore, will try contributing to the field both for what concerns the type of investigation proposed and the data analysed. The study starts from the macro-context of the speech event analysed and proceeds to an in-depth study of its linguistic constituents. The analysis will set up a discourse and genre framework to define at first the discursive and generic structure of the Public Inquiry; the scope of the observation will then be restricted to the role of reformulations that are central in the construction of lawyers’ questions. This should help to shed some light on a type of courtroom discourse scarcely considered by the previous literature, contributing to a better understanding of the dynamics of the lawyer-witness exchange.