How are violence and gender talked about in public? : cultural assumptions and the discursive construction of the past

Abstract

From the theoretical perspective of situated discourse analysis and drawing on the related research traditions of critical discourse analysis and conversation analysis, this study examines the discursive construction of interested versions of the past in the context of lay witness examinations. The view of discourse advocated acknowledges its socially constructed nature, and understands it as a complex configuration of semiotic resources. The corpus analyzed is made up of a linguistic subcorpus of twelve lay witness examinations and a multimodal subcorpus of 101 video clips featuring extracts from interactions between lay witnesses and litigants. The analysis reveals that litigants deploy interactional mechanisms that guarantee the generation of implications favorable for the version of the past upheld. One of the mechanisms identified includes the use of questions about the meaning of everyday expressions. The other consists in combining questions about specific past behaviors with those that invoke mental representations stored in situation models. This study also includes an exploration of different speechaccompanying gestures that cooccur with a specific kind of propositional content. It is shown that lay witnesses’ use of hand movements combined with facial expressions and head shakes is related to the type of cognitive activity performed and the kind of information requested in the question. The examination of the recurrent interactional routines initiated by litigants indicates that institutional participants resort to mechanisms through which they guide their interlocutors into verbalizing content aimed at generating implications that are damaging to the positive face of parties involved in the conflict. The analysis reveals that, in the examinations observed, what gets systematically evaluated is witnesses’ past sexualized conduct. This suggests that witness credibility can be attacked by alluding to the dimension of morality. This study concludes by unveiling the cultural assumptions and values about sexualized practices that permit that covert evaluations be generated.