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2006
Volume 39, Issue 3 (current issue)
Special issue: The relationship between spoken interaction and written documentation in legal settings
Introduction
Martha L. KomterFrom talk to text: The interactional construction of a police record
Martha L. Komter
In the Netherlands, police records are routinely drawn up in the course of the interrogation. As a result, recording practices are closely interwoven with interrogation activities. The interrogation is organized to accommodate the recording, and the recording informs the interrogation. The record is not merely a document in which what is said is written down, it actively informs and directs the interrogation: The record-thus-far is used by the interrogator as a resource to carry on the interrogation. Consequently, what gets written down in the record and is eventually used as evidence in a criminal law case is not just a reflection of what the interrogator has asked and the suspect has answered but also a result of the interrogator's solutions to problems of coordinating the talk and the typing. Thus, police records can only be understood fully by taking into account the practices of their construction.The interweaving of talk and text in a French criminal pre-trial hearing
Esther Gonzáles Martinez
In this article, I analyze the talk between a suspect and a prosecutor during a pretrial hearing within the framework of the French criminal procedure of comparution immediate (immediate trial). In this hearing, according to the law, the prosecutor is supposed to verify the suspect's identity, inform the suspect of the charges against him or her, and write down the suspect's statements if he or she chooses to make any.1 However, most of this meeting is taken up by a prosecutor-led discussion during which interlocutors display accounts of the alleged facts, produce series of questions and answers, dispute issues related to the case, and formulate the suspect's statement in written form. I show that this statement, overseen carefully by the prosecutor, emerges through the interweaving of different sequential activities, with talk and text reflexively constituting one another, in a restrictive speech exchange system fitted to the prosecutor's institutional orientations mainly with respect to building the case against the suspect.Orientations to law, guidelines and codes in lawyer-client interaction
Iris Halldorsdottir
Central to criminal defense case processing are lawyer–client interactions in which texts (law, codes, or guidelines) are invoked and from which texts (case records) are constructed. From interactions with clients, lawyers construct case records that document the client's account of the event in question, records that are later used as the basis of further interactions. In interactions, lawyers invoke law, codes, and guidelines to intimate possible obstacles in the evidence or defenses in the law and furthermore, to justify, repudiate, or explain different courses of action. In these ways, lawyers' orientations to law, codes, and guidelines demonstrate the purposes guiding criminal defense work.The micro-formation of criminal defense: On the lawyer’s notes, speech-production, and field of presence
Thomas Scheffer
In the following discourse analysis, I crisscross the realms of text and talk to follow the microformation of legal discourse. How, I ask, does a barrister put together the case for a Crown Court hearing? This representational project, I argue, involves assorted artefacts (marks, modules, maps, or lists) that are consulted as resources on succeeding stages. The various sites of the microformation are the brief, the barrister's note book, and some confidential and staged speech events. The offered trans-sequential analysis of legal discourse puts into perspective preparation and performance, file work and speech production, procedural history, and the field of presence. I explore, above all, the unknown region in between judicial talk and textuality. In this way, in the article, I account for the complexity, contingency, and craft of criminal defense.Estimate page count: 126 pps.
Volume 39, Issue 4
“To be honest”: Sequential uses of honesty phrases in talk-in-interaction
Derek Edwards & Alessandra FasuloCoordinating gesture, talk and gaze in reenactments
Jack SidnellBehold the power of Qi: The importance of Qi in the discourse of acupuncture
Evelyn Y. Ho“No, we’re not playing families”: Membership categorization in children’s play
Carly Butler & Ann WeatherallEstimated page count 118 pps.
