Correlations of status positions of courtroom discourse participants
Irina V. Palashevskaya – Victor V. Leontiev – Elena A. Kurchenkova – Elizaveta D. Stepanova – Dmitri S. Bulanov
DOI: 10.18355/XL.2017.10.03.04
Abstract
The article focuses on the status characteristics of courtroom discourse participants, including institutional position of a person and its correlations with other positions in the courtroom communicative space, modality of communicative acts, and speech formula, which constitute the courtroom discourse. The social status of a person, being the fundamental concept in sociology (Weber 1978, Parsons 1949, Abrahamson 1969), sociolinguistics (Bernstein 1979, Guy 1982, Harms 1961, Schatzmann, Strauss 1972), has been analyzed in the present article from the point of view of pragmalinguistics (Solan 1993, Karasik 2002, Eades 2008, Wagner, Cheng 2011). The pragmalinguistic approach to the status of a person involved in court proceedings aims to reveal the situational characteristics of equality / inequality relations in courtroom, finding reflections in certain agent types and communicative trajectories in communicative space, speech act types and their combinations, norms of verbal and non-verbal behavior and rules of communication, constituting the discourse.
Key words: courtroom discourse, status-marked communication, speech etiquette conventions, speech acts modality, communicative role, acts of reaction to role performance, preventive acts, coordination (harmonization) acts, interactional discrimination.