"I think that's not an assumption you ought to make"

by JLS
for the GC

An abstract


S. Ehrlich and J. Sidnell.

“I think that's not an assumption you ought to make”: Challenging
presuppositions in inquiry testimony

Language in Society, vol. 35

"This article examines data drawn from a 2001 Ontario (Canada)

provincial inquiry into the deaths of seven people as a result

of water contamination in a small Ontario town. The examination

focuses on

question-answer sequences

in which the premier of Ontario, Michael Harris, attempted to resist

lawyers' attempts to control and restrict his responses. In particular,

on the basis of the data it is argued that

the power of cross-examining lawyers

does not reside solely in


their ability to ask controlling and restrictive questions of witnesses,

but rather is crucially dependent on their ability to

compel witnesses to produce straightforward, or “type-conforming,”

answers to these controlling and restrictive questions.


The witness whose testimony is analyzed was not compelled

to produce answers that logically conformed to the form of

the lawyers' questions

(i.e., “yes” or “no”) and, as a result,

often usurped control over the topical agenda of the proceedings.

In this sense, the present work builds on Eades's conclusion that

“we cannot rely on question form to discover how witnesses are controlled.”


Key Words:

courtroom discourse; conversation analysis; presupposition; question-answer sequences.