McCaul, Kim (2011). Understanding courtroom communication through cultural scripts. In Le Cheng, & Anne Wagner (Eds.), Exploring courtroom discourse: The language of power and control (pp. 11-28). Farnham: Ashgate.
In this chapter I explore courtroom communication and its origin in legal culture, explicitly avoiding the kind of value judgments that some linguists arrive at when analyzing the seemingly asocial use that barristers often make of language. Instead, I intend to show how such language usage arises naturally from the culture of the law, and highlight a number of usually unstated premises that underpin courtroom communication. In particular, I will explore how the relationship between barrister and witness is determined by the culture of advocacy.
I will use a tool from cross-cultural linguistics called the “cultural script,” which not only helps to develop succinct synopses of those premises, but could also provide a method by which they can be explained to lay people entering the courtroom, including L2 speakers of English and non-English speakers.
