A Pragmalinguistic Analysis of Courtroom Questions in a Multilingual Context

Abstract

The paper is a pragmalinguistic analysis of the triadic verbal exchanges among the lawyers, the witness and the court interpreters during the courtroom interrogation in a multilingual context. It involved nine lawyers who interrogated 15 witnesses who belonged to different cultural backgrounds and spoke different languages. Inasmuch as the witnesses testified in their own language, the court interpreters assumed a critical role as facilitators of the communication of evidence during the courtroom talk. The corpus of the study consisted of the recordings of hearings of the interpreted testimonies of 13 different criminal cases heard at the 9th Judicial Regional Trial Courts in Zamboanga City particularly at Branches 14, 15, 16 and 17. All the questions asked by the lawyers and the corresponding answers of the witness to the questions during the direct examination and cross-examination were recorded and later on transcribed, constituted the corpus of the study.

The courtroom questions were categorized in terms of the following levels: (I) lexico-semantic structures of questions (1) lexical choice (modal auxiliaries (can and could), and (2) nominals of address (Madam/Mr. Witness, mam or sir, and (b) Syntactic structures of questions that included (a) WH-questions, (b) Bi-polar questions and (c) Open-ended questions. It analyzed the (II) Sequential levels of questions as (a) Preliminary, (b) Information-checking, and (c) Evidence-validating questions used by the lawyers and differentiated them from the sequential levels of questions used during the two modalities of courtroom interrogations. The analysis of the discourse functions of courtroom questions were likewise done that focused on the three types of communication strategies, namely (a) Indirect Speech Acts (ISA’s) and (b) Declaratives without tags (DWOT’s) principally used by the lawyers, and (c) the use of Self-repair Strategies (Repetition (RE) and (b) Reformulation (RF) mainly used by the court interpreters when they interpreted the lawyers’ questions as well as the witnesses’ answers to the questions.

The study found that the modal auxiliaries 'Can' and 'Could' were used as a softening device and/or as an indirect request. Both modals pervaded during the direct examination, whereas the nominals of address were used in almost the same number of times by both the prosecution and the defense lawyers. Of the three question types, WH-question predominated the direct examination followed by Bi-polar questions. Open-ended questions were minimally used by both the prosecution and the defense lawyers. The sequential levels of questioning were utilized by the respective lawyers to develop a distinct version of the story that favored their respective ends. The defense lawyers exploited the use of the communication strategies, namely, Indirect Speech Acts (ISA’) and Declaratives without tags (DWOT’s) during the cross-examination. On the other hand, the court interpreters used Repetition (RE) and/or Reformulation (RF) when they interpreted the lawyers’ questions and the witnesses’ answers to the questions when a literal interpretation was not possible.