FAQ

The whole truth? Hypothetical questions and the (de)construction of knowledge in expert witness cross-examination

Data publikacji: 28.02.2023

Studia Linguistica Universitatis Iagellonicae Cracoviensis, 2023, Volume 140, Issue 1, s. 67 - 93

https://doi.org/10.4467/20834624SL.23.004.17264

Autorzy

Magdalena Szczyrbak
Uniwersytet Jagielloński w Krakowie, Polska, ul. Gołębia 24, 31-007 Kraków
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0182-0938 Orcid
Wszystkie publikacje autora →

Tytuły

The whole truth? Hypothetical questions and the (de)construction of knowledge in expert witness cross-examination

Abstrakt

This paper examines the relation between hypotheticals and epistemic stance in jury trials, and it reveals how hypothetically framed questions (HQs) are used in cross- examination to construct “the admissible truth” (Gutheil et al. 2003) which is then turned into evidence. It looks at a selection of interactional exchanges identified in the transcripts and video recordings which document two days of expert witness cross- examination in two high-profile criminal cases. In the study, two approaches to data analysis were combined: a bottom-up approach focusing on markers of HQs offering “points of entry” into discourse through a corpus-assisted analysis and a top-down approach looking at cross-examination as a complex communicative event, providing a more holistic view of the interactional context in which HQs are used. The paper explains the role which such questions play in the positioning of opposing knowledge claims, as well as discusses the effect they create in hostile interaction with expert witnesses. As is revealed, HQs are used to elicit the witness’s assessments of alternative scenarios of past events and causal links involving the facts of the case; to elicit the witness’s assessments of general hypothetical scenarios not involving the facts of the case, or to undermine the validity of the witness’s method of analysis. In sum, the paper explains how the use of HQs aids cross-examining attorneys in deconstructing unfavourable testimony and constructing the “legal truth” which supports their narrative.

Bibliografia

Armstrong S., Jackson J.A., Hoffman J.L. 2018. The role of the primary care provider in longterm counselling: Establishing a therapeutic alliance with child and family. – Freemark M. (ed.). Pediatric obesity. Contemporary endocrinology. Cham: Humana Press: 685–693.

Bednarek M. 2006. Epistemological positioning and evidentiality in English news discourse: A text-driven approach. – Text & Talk 26.6: 635–660.

Biber D., Johansson S., Leech G., Conrad S., Finegan E. 1999. The Longman grammar of spoken and written English. London: Longman.

Bongelli R., Riccioni I., Fermani A., Philip G. 2020. Hypothetical questions in everyday Italian conversations. – Lingua 246: 102951.

Brodsky S.L, Titcomb C., Sams D.M., Dickson K., Benda Y. 2012. Hypothetical constructs, hypothetical questions, and the expert witness. – International Journal of Law and Psychiatry 35: 354–361.

Byrne R.M.J. 2007. Précis of The Rational Imagination: How people create alternatives to reality. – Behavioral and Brain Sciences 30: 439–480.

Catellani P., Bertolotti M., Vagni M., Pajardi D. 2021. How expert witnesses’ counterfactuals influence causal and responsibility attributions of mock jurors and expert judges. – Applied Cognitive Psychology 35: 3–17.

Coleridge S.T.C. 1888. Table-talk, December 27, 1831 – Ashe T. (ed.). The table talk and omniana of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. London: George Bell and Sons: 147.

Cotterill J. 2003. Language and power in court: A linguistic analysis of the O.J. Simpson trial. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Dancygier B., Sweetser E. 2000. Construction with if, since and because: Causality, epistemic stance, and clause order – Couper-Kuhlen E., Kortmann B. (eds.). Cause-condition-concession-contrast: Cognitive and discourse perspectives. [Topics in Linguistics 33]. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter: 111–142.

Dancygier B., Sweetser E. 2005. Mental spaces in grammar. Conditional constructions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Davis B.G. 2009. Tools for teaching. [2nd edition]. San Francisco (CA): John Wiley & Sons. Drew P. 1992. Contested evidence in courtroom cross-examination: The case of a trial for rape. – Drew P., Heritage J. (eds.). Talk at work. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 470–520.

Fauconnier G. 1985. Mental spaces. Cambridge (MA): MIT Press.

Fauconnier G. 1994. Mental spaces. Aspects of meaning construction in natural language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Fetzer A. 2014. Foregrounding evidentiality in (English) academic discourse: Patterned co-occurrences of the sensory perception verbs seem and appear. – Intercultural Pragmatics 11.3: 333–355.

Golato A. 2012. Impersonal quotation and hypothetical discourse. – Buchstaller I., Van Alphen I. (eds.). Quotatives: Cross-linguistic and cross disciplinary perspectives. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins: 3–36.

Gutheil T.G., Hauser M., White M.S., Spruiell G., Strasburger L.H. 2003. “The whole truth” versus “the admissible truth”: An ethics dilemma for expert witnesses. – The Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law 31: 422–427.

Heffer C. 2005. The language of jury trial. A corpus-aided analysis of legal-lay discourse. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Hobbs P. 2002. Tipping the scales of justice: Deconstructing an expert’s testimony on cross-examination. – International Journal for the Semiotics of Law 15.4: 411–424.

Holt E., Johnson A. 2010. Legal talk. The sociopragmatics of legal talk: Police interviews and trial discourse. – Coulthard M., Johnson A. (eds.). The Routledge handbook of forensic linguistics. London: Routledge: 21–36.

Hurley G.F. 2018. The playbook of persuasive reasoning: Everyday empowerment and like-ability. Wilmington, Malaga: Vernon Press.

Johnson A. 2002. So…? Pragmatic implications of so-prefaced questions in formal police interviews. – Cotterill J. (ed.). Language in the legal process. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan: 91–110.

Johnson T.R. 2004. Oral arguments and decision making on the United States Supreme Court. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Kahneman D., Miller D. 1986. Norm theory: Comparing reality to its alternatives. – Psychological Review 93: 136–153.

Koester A., Handford M. 2018. ‘It’s not good saying “Well it it might do that or it might not”: Hypothetical reported speech in business meetings. – Journal of Pragmatics 130: 67–80.

Land V., Parry R., Pino M., Jenkins L., Feathers L., Faull C. 2018. Addressing possible problems with patients’ expectations, plans and decisions for the future: One strategy used by experienced clinicians in advance care planning conversations. – Patient Education and Counseling 102.4: 670–679.

Lohrová H., Koester A. 2023. Formulating hypothetical talk. An action-driven approach to communicating stance in business meetings. Studia Linguistica Universitatis Iagellonicae Cracoviensis 140.1: 1–25.

Luchjenbroers J. 1997. “In your own words …”: Questions and answers in a Supreme Court trial. – Journal of Pragmatics 27: 477–503.

Malphurs R.A. 2013. Rhetoric and discourse in Supreme Court oral arguments. Sensemaking in judicial opinions. London, New York: Routledge.

Marín Arrese J. 2011. Effective vs. epistemic stance and subjectivity in political discourse. Legitimising strategies and mystification of responsibility. – Hart C. (ed.). Critical discourse studies in context and cognition. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins: 193–223.

Marín Arrese J. 2015. Epistemicity and stance: A cross-linguistic study of epistemic stance strategies in journalistic discourse in English and Spanish. – Discourse Studies 17.2: 210–225.

Matoesian G., Gilbert K.E. 2018. Multimodal conduct in the law. Language, gesture and materiality in legal interaction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Meyer M. 1980. Dialectic questioning: Socrates and Plato. – American Philosophical Quarterly 17: 281–289.

Mortensen S.S. 2020. A question of control? Forms and functions of courtroom questioning in two different adversarial trial systems. – Scandinavian Studies in Language 11.1: 239–278.

Nuyts J. 2001. Epistemic modality, language and conceptualisation: A cognitive-pragmatic perspective. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

O’Barr W. 1982. Linguistic evidence. Language, power, and strategy in the courtroom. San Diego, New York: Academic Academic Press.

Ochs E. 1996. Linguistic resources for socialising humanity. – Gumperz J.J., Levinson S.C. (eds.). Rethinking linguistic relativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 407–437.

Partington A., Duguid A., Taylor C. 2013. Patterns and meanings in discourse. Theory and practice in corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS). Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Peräkylä A. 1993. Invoking a hostile world: Discussing the patient’s future in AIDS counselling. – Text 13.2: 291–316.

Peräkylä A. 1995. AIDS counselling. Institutional interaction and clinical practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Prettyman E.B., Jr. 1984. The Supreme Court’s use of hypothetical questions at oral argument. – Catholic University Law Review 33: 555–591.

Renoe C.E. 1996. Seeing is believing: Expert testimony and the construction of interpretative authority in an American trial. – International Journal for the Semiotics of Law 9: 115–137.

Rocci A. 2009. Doing discourse analysis with possible worlds. – Renkema J. (ed.). Discourse, of course. An overview of research in discourse studies. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins: 15–35.

Scott M. 2012. WordSmith Tools. [version 6], Stroud: Lexical Analysis Software.

Speer S.A. 2012. Hypothetical questions: A comparative analysis and implications for “applied” vs “basic” conversation analysis. – Research on Language and Social Interaction 45.4: 352–374.

Speer S.A., Parsons C. 2006. Gatekeeping gender: Some features of the use of hypothetical questions in the psychiatric assessment of transsexual patients. – Discourse and Society 17.6: 785–812.

Tetlock P.E., Lebow R.N., Parker G. 2005. Unmaking the West: Counterfactuals, contingency, and causation. Ann Arbor (MI): University of Michigan Press.

Tognini-Bonelli E. 2001. Corpus linguistics at work. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Tversky A., Kahneman D. 1973. Availability: A heuristic for judging frequency and probability. – Cognitive Psychology 5.2: 207–232.

Ward T. 2017. Expert testimony, law and epistemic authority. – Journal of Applied Philosophy 34.2: 263–277.

Wigmore J.H. 1940. Evidence in trials at common law. [4th edition]. Boston: Little, Brown and Company.

Winchatz M.R., Kozin A. 2008. Comical hypothetical: Arguing for a conversational phenomenon. – Discourse Studies 10.3: 383–405.

Woodbury H. 1984. The strategic use of questions in court. – Semiotica 48.3–4: 197–228.

Informacje

Informacje: Studia Linguistica Universitatis Iagellonicae Cracoviensis, 2023, Volume 140, Issue 1, s. 67 - 93

Typ artykułu: Oryginalny artykuł naukowy

Tytuły:

Polski:

The whole truth? Hypothetical questions and the (de)construction of knowledge in expert witness cross-examination

Angielski:

The whole truth? Hypothetical questions and the (de)construction of knowledge in expert witness cross-examination

Autorzy

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0182-0938

Magdalena Szczyrbak
Uniwersytet Jagielloński w Krakowie, Polska, ul. Gołębia 24, 31-007 Kraków
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0182-0938 Orcid
Wszystkie publikacje autora →

Uniwersytet Jagielloński w Krakowie, Polska, ul. Gołębia 24, 31-007 Kraków

Publikacja: 28.02.2023

Status artykułu: Otwarte __T_UNLOCK

Licencja: CC BY  ikona licencji

Udział procentowy autorów:

Magdalena Szczyrbak (Autor) - 100%

Korekty artykułu:

-

Języki publikacji:

Angielski