The Language of Jury Trial
Subtitle: A Corpus-Aided Linguistic Analysis of Legal-Lay Discourse
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Published: April 13, 2006
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 272
ISBN-13: 9781403942470
Subjects: Advocacy; English legal system: criminal procedure; Sociolinguistics; Language Arts & Disciplines; Courts; Discourse Analysis; Legal Reference / Law Profession; Language; Linguistics; Law; Dictionaries & Terminology; Jury; Social Science / Criminology; Courts - General
Description: "This is the first detailed analysis of the language of legal professionals in English jury trial, drawing on the largest and must representative corpus of official trial transcripts ever compiled. Chris Heffer analyses patterns of language use across hundreds of texts and develops a model of legal-lay communication based on strategic tension between narrative and scientific modes of reasoning. As well as providing, descriptive and explanatory accounts of 'legal-lay discourse', the book makes a linguistic case for the survival of the lay jury against growing calls for professionalization."--BOOK JACKET.