Journal of Historical Pragmatics - Volume 7, Issue 2, 2006

This paper draws on the trial section of the Sociopragmatic Corpus to explore the interaction of judges and defendants in the English courtroom (1640–1760). I show that defendants tended to be more actively involved in their defence than defendants are today, because of: (i) the absence of legal counsel (although this was changing during our period), and (ii) a perceived need that defendants should demonstrate their own innocence, via their response(s) to evidence given against them. I also reveal that the judges’ role differed from the role adopted by judges today. Rather than presiding over the court, they were actively involved in the trial’s production. Moreover, several of the treason trials within the corpus suggest that their interaction with defendants did not follow a question–answer format. Consequently, I propose that we might need to study more than questions and answers to fully appreciate the dynamics of the historical courtroom.

The paper investigates whether the notion of impoliteness worked out for synchronic pragmatics is also applicable in diachronic pragmatics. An analysis of two Early Modern English court trial records demonstrates that the answer is positive provided some new dimensions are added. My model of impoliteness cuts across the following axes: structural, semantic, and pragmatic. Structural impoliteness ranges from words and phrases to portions of texts, thus the syntactic dimension cuts across the complexity dimension. The semantic/pragmatic dimension includes numerous non-literal meanings of impoliteness. An utterance can be judged as impolite on the basis of its surface representations (“overt impoliteness”), or the impoliteness of an expression has to be inferred and takes the form of an implicature (“covert impoliteness”). Thus, the final interpretation would depend both on the speaker’s intention when producing an utterance, its (perlocutionary) effect(s) on the addressee, and the overall context. Finally, all these variables cut across the socio-historical dimension.

Trial proceedings and depositions are textual genres that create particular demands for speech marking in discourse. This study examines the use of the expository apposition marker videlicet in both a sample of Early Modern depositions of defamation and several electronic corpora. It finds that videlicet developed a grammaticalized quotative sense concurrent with its borrowing into English and, further, that this grammaticalized sense developed only in legal records. Considering the evolution of videlicet shows us how functionality evolves to fit a particular set of generic needs. Videlicet provides a case of grammaticalization restricted to a single register, and can therefore be instructive about the diffusion of grammaticalized forms across genres and about the intersection of grammaticalization and code-switching.

In comparison with Russian trial transcripts of the fifteenth century, trial transcripts of the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries show a drift toward compact, writer-based reporting styles. In an earlier study (Collins 2001), I suggested that this happened because of significant changes in legal institutions. From being primarily oral confrontations, trials became battles of documents filed in chanceries and scrutinized by bureaucrats oriented to the written word; concomitantly, the transcripts became dossiers of documents literally glued together and framed by short narrative passages, including reports of dialogue. In the present study I examine a representative sample of these trial dossiers to demonstrate the link between reporting and discourse-organization strategies and chancery practices. First, I discuss how the dossiers are arranged into episodes graphically and syntactically. Second, I investigate the methods of speech reporting utilized in the trial dossiers and the contextual motivation for the choice of one method over another.

In this paper I employ a diachronic model of analyzing speech acts to trace the development of sworn testimonies through the history of the Polish criminal trial. The research is based on the complete collection of medieval testimonies in Old Polish that have survived to the present day and on a selection of legal texts recorded in modern criminal trials. My preliminary assumption is that a proper analysis of institutional acts such as testimonies can only be achieved when their socio-historical context is taken into account. This is due to the fact that the very existence of legal speech acts depends on a set of constitutive rules that are socially and historically variable. The study corroborates my hypothesis and offers evidence in favor of the view that the changing legal context in which testimonies occur affects not only the ways in which they are realized over time but also their performative function.