This book explores the prevalent use of various language techniques in legal communication and examines how legal professionals employ those language techniques to mobilize the opinions of lay jurors at one important stage of courtroom trials, that is, court-trial closing arguments.
This book consists of seven chapters. Chapter 1 introduces the nature and function of closing arguments in courtroom trials and sorts out previous studies on this legal genre. Chapter 2 explains theories (e.g. critical discourse analysis) and frameworks (e.g. systemic functional grammar) that the author invokes in order to investigate how closing arguments are constructed differently by lawyers of competing interests. This chapter provides an engaging discussion on the dual functions of discourse in the construction of social reality: discourse as representation and discourse as social interaction. While the significance of studying both functions is acknowledged, the author highlights that her interest is to examine how competing lawyers construct different versions of legal realities and then present them to the lay jurors in the form of closing arguments. The author, in this chapter, also explains the three techniques competing lawyers were found to employ to construct closing arguments, that is, silencing, de-emphasizing, and emphasizing.
Chapters 3–6 examine the linguistic manifestation of silencing, de-emphasizing, and emphasizing in lawyers’ competing representation of the key participants of court trials respectively, that is, defendants, victims, jurors, and judges. Chapter 3 investigates how prosecution and defending lawyers carefully select lexical and syntactic structures to portray a defendant as a guilty ‘sinner’ or an innocent ‘saint’ (p. 51). Chapter 4 uses Theo van Leeuwen's concept of nomination and categorization to look at how prosecution and defense lawyers (de)personalize and evaluate victims. The author finds that both prosecution and defense lawyers tend to personalize victims by addressing them with their names. While defense lawyers use the full form of victims’ names to de-emphasize their unique identity, the prosecution addresses victims with less formal diminutive nicknames to emphasize ‘extreme high solidarity’ (p. 57) between victims and the present jurors. Chapter 5 analyzes how prosecution and defense lawyers construct jurors’ identities by emphasizing the wanted aspects of their roles while silencing/de-emphasizing the unwanted ones. Research findings are based on the statistical analysis of two reference strategies—pronouns and noun phrases. Chapter 6 explores, quantitatively, how prosecutors and defense lawyers address selves to ‘make themselves seem more believable and trustworthy’ (p. 172). Both prosecution and defense lawyers usually act with a great deal of civility and respect; instead of attacking the opponents’ credibility, they choose to build their own identities through emphasizing their own positive attributes and silencing the opponents’ voices completely.
Chapter 7 concludes the book by claiming that although jurors have the right to make a verdict, it is lawyers who ‘control and constrain exactly what versions of reality are available to the jurors’ (p. 202).
As revealed by this meticulous linguistic examination of lawyers’ professional discursive practices, lay participants in legal communication become increasingly disadvantaged partly because the site of interaction has become a venue for lawyers’ skillful maneuvering of language techniques, particularly in line with their own values and interests. The book may be of interest for researchers in the discipline of discourse analysis, applied linguistics, and professional communication.
