Discourse & Society

This paper examines the management of accusations and defences, and the interplay between legal requirements and everyday conversational mechanisms in Dutch courtroom interaction. Two kinds of accusations are distinguished: those brought forward by the public prosecutor in the official charges, and those that are implied in the questions of the judges. The official charges foreclose or anticipate a number of possible defences, although defendants do not have the opportunity to respond immediately. The blame implied in the judges' questions generate various kinds of defences, depending on whether the questions are oriented to facts or to morals.

The judges' factual questions generate partial admissions or qualified versions, by which defendants tone down or disguise the more harmful elements of the alleged offence. Questions asking for a moral evaluation are followed by moral affirmation of the defendants, after which they try to mitigate their moral responsibility by way of excuses and justifications. The excuses and justifications brought forward by the defendants can be seen as everyday versions of legal grounds for immunity.

We analyzed the language in a random sample of recent Western Canadian trial judgments in cases of sexual assault. We discovered five anomalous themes: erotic/affectionate characterization of sexual assault; sexual assault as distinct from violence; appropriate resistance by the victim; the good character of the offender; and grammatically omitting the agent of the assault. These themes are illustrated in context by a detailed analysis of one of the judgments. We propose that such themes may occur because, while there are interpretative repertoires for stranger rape and consensual sex, there is virtually no accurate vocabulary or narrative structure for the more common cases in which the assailant is not a stranger to the victim. The language currently used springs from—but also contributes to—establishing a false dichotomy between stereotypical stranger rape and consensual sexual contact; that is, either the sexual assault meets all of the characteristics of a stereotypical stranger rape or it is described as sexual contact and not as a sexual assault.

The purpose of this paper is to describe how a speaker in a bilingual, binational communicative event uses deictic expressions to index and build social relationships. After a short review of related theoretical issues a description of the communicative event is provided as well as a description of the sociopolitical and geographical contexts for the discourse. An analysis is then presented of the meanings of the deictic term `we' in one key conference speech. The analysis traces how the speaker builds relationships of solidarity and opposition, how he mitigates oppositional relationships based on ideological criteria, and how he constructs power hierarchies. I argue that rhetorical goals, including affective goals, are addressed through a coherent development and ordering of shifting meanings of deictic terms in discourse.

This paper analyzes a political discourse in the Japanese Diet focusing on the testimony given by the former Prime Minister, Noboru Takeshita, on 7 December 1992. Given the fact that Takeshita's rhetorical style—often referred to as Takeshita-go (`Takeshita-speak')—is dubbed as gengo meiryoo, imi fumei (`clear-in-language, unknown-in-meaning'), in this paper I investigate the former Prime Minister's speech style and question what it is that causes his particular style of speech to be characterized as such. I analyze the tape-recorded hearing and identify various pragmatic strategies to achieve `involvement' and `integrity'. These devices include, among others, politeness expression, self-quotation, quotative explanation, repetition, lexical choice and lexical (re-)definition, and strategies to humble oneself. An overall pragmatic strategy that Takeshita-speak favors is juxtaposing different semiotic contexts: the ordinary and the institutional as well as the linguistic and the metalinguistic. I conclude that juxtaposition of semiotic contexts along with involvement and integrity strategies plays a significant role in characterizing Takeshita-speak as `clear-in-language, unknown-in-meaning'. Comments are made regarding the possible universal versus culturally relative nature of the pragmatics of the style, and theoretical implications of this study are suggested.