{"title":"Insincerity in lawyers’ questioning strategies in Malawian criminal courtroom discourse","authors":"Wellman Kondowe","doi":"10.1515/text-2022-0083","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"This paper introduces a new perspective on analysing courtroom insincerity by focusing on questions asked by lawyers in the Malawi criminal justice system. The study aimed at examining the linguistic tools of tracing insincerity in lawyers’ questions; the varying degrees of insincerity in defence and prosecution lawyers and their rationale for making such choices. The study argues that courtroom setting is a war zone where different parties have divergent goals. Such encounters are much likely to yield higher chances of insincerity, which can be manifested in the questions lawyers ask. The analysis is based on data from four criminal cases, which were collected from the High Court of Malawi. My framework of analysing insincerity in questions examines the prescribed degrees of control that questions exert on the witnesses in relation to their productiveness. The findings indicate that, when examining witnesses, prosecutors exercise less insincerity while defence lawyers opt for questions with high insincerity. These imbalances in language use are enshrined in and supported by law in its statutes. The findings of this study have jurisprudential implications, especially in Africa which is internationally less represented in the studies of language and law.","PeriodicalId":46455,"journal":{"name":"Text & Talk","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8000,"publicationDate":"2023-12-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Text & Talk","FirstCategoryId":"98","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1515/text-2022-0083","RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q3","JCRName":"COMMUNICATION","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
This paper introduces a new perspective on analysing courtroom insincerity by focusing on questions asked by lawyers in the Malawi criminal justice system. The study aimed at examining the linguistic tools of tracing insincerity in lawyers’ questions; the varying degrees of insincerity in defence and prosecution lawyers and their rationale for making such choices. The study argues that courtroom setting is a war zone where different parties have divergent goals. Such encounters are much likely to yield higher chances of insincerity, which can be manifested in the questions lawyers ask. The analysis is based on data from four criminal cases, which were collected from the High Court of Malawi. My framework of analysing insincerity in questions examines the prescribed degrees of control that questions exert on the witnesses in relation to their productiveness. The findings indicate that, when examining witnesses, prosecutors exercise less insincerity while defence lawyers opt for questions with high insincerity. These imbalances in language use are enshrined in and supported by law in its statutes. The findings of this study have jurisprudential implications, especially in Africa which is internationally less represented in the studies of language and law.
期刊介绍:
Text & Talk (founded as TEXT in 1981) is an internationally recognized forum for interdisciplinary research in language, discourse, and communication studies, focusing, among other things, on the situational and historical nature of text/talk production; the cognitive and sociocultural processes of language practice/action; and participant-based structures of meaning negotiation and multimodal alignment. Text & Talk encourages critical debates on these and other relevant issues, spanning not only the theoretical and methodological dimensions of discourse but also their practical and socially relevant outcomes.