Grazyna Anna Bednarek's Polish vs. American courtroom discourse is an important contribution to scholarship both in the field of discourse analysis and sociolegal studies. Its major objective is to explore the cross-cultural similarities and disparities between Polish and American courtroom discourse in terms of their inquisitorial and adversarial procedures of witness examination in criminal trials. The most distinctive feature of this book is its insightful methodology that enables the readers to look into courtroom discourse from different perspectives, including both linguistic and legal studies as well as both qualitative and quantitative studies.

Chapter 1 sets up the stage for the whole book. First, after introducing its major objective, it explains its rationale that courtroom interpreters need to be conversant with both Polish and American courtroom discourse to guarantee the accused persons a fair trail. Then it provides a concise overview of the previous research on courtroom discourse from diverse perspectives. After that, it delineates its key concepts, such as law, legal system and culture. Furthermore, on the basis of the two hypotheses that courtroom discourse is culturally varied and socially conditioned, the author justifies the data and methodology applied in the current research.

Chapters 2 and 3 present an empirical study of American and Polish courtroom discourse from three perspectives: the ethnography of communication, conversation analysis, and pragmatics. First, analyzing courtroom discourse by means of the ethnography of communication involves investigating eight aspects: (i) setting, (ii) participants, (iii) ends, (iv) act sequence, (v) key, (vi) instrumentalities, (vii) norms of interaction, and (viii) genres. This method allows an examination of the rules of speaking for different speech situations, speech events, and speech acts. Second, the employment of conversation analysis allows the author to (a) examine the organization of turn-taking in courtroom discourse, (b) investigate courtroom interaction during the criminal trial; (c) identify the social roles that the key participants play, and (d) analyze question and answer adjacency pairs during the examination of witnesses. Third, the use of pragmatics enables the study of how people use spoken language to do things in the courtroom by analyzing various speech acts that express requests, statements, or commands.

Chapter 4 compares the findings on Polish and American courtroom discourse and points out their major implications. The findings endorse and validate the two hypotheses put forward in chapter 1, and show that criminal trials conducted under Civil Law (Polish courtroom) and Common Law (American courtroom) are two culturally distinct and socially conditioned phenomena. Finally, the author points out that the discrepancies between Polish versus American courtroom discourse may be accredited to the two different legal principles on which the two criminal trials were based in Poland and the United States, namely the principle of substantive truth and the principle of formal truth, respectively. Overall, the findings of this book suggest that it will not only benefit researchers in the area of courtroom discourse, but also practicing courtroom interpreters as well as students and researchers specializing in translation studies.