Grice on cross-examination

by JLS
for the GC

From

http://web.bham.ac.uk/forensic/IAFL03/abstracts.html

Janet Cotterill (Cardiff): "Rebellion, resistance and other ways of behaving badly: how, when and why witnesses 'break the rules' of courtroom interaction"

ABSTRACT

"Much of the linguistics literature on trial interaction

over the past 25 years has sought to describe the mechanisms of

witness examination and cross-examination in the adversarial

courtroom."

"Seminal early work in the field, eg by J. M. Atkinson and Paul Drew, "Order in Court", 1979, O'Barr (et al.), 1978/1982, Harris, 1984, and Woodbury, 1984, has in the main concentrated on the identification and/or quantification of

asymmetrical turn-taking

and questioning patterns between lawyers and witnesses in court."

"However, underpinning the majority of this work, and reflected in more recent research consolidating these initial findings, is the assumption that there exists a relatively homogenous group of individuals - 'witnesses' - who follow a set of pre-ordained and prescriptive interactional rules which are generally understood and adhered to by trial participants."

"Drawing on a unique 12 million word corpus of courtroom data from English Crown Courts in the late 1990s, this paper focuses

not on transgressions of the law, but rather on

trangressions of language, and


attempts to describe some of the strategies and practices of
witnesses who appear to break these interactional 'rules';



how, when and why they do so and what the potential consequences
might be for their credibility in court."