“I can give reasons for that opinion if required”: Metadiscourse and gender in historical expert and lay witness testimonies

Michela Giordano

;Maria Antonietta Marongiu

2025-01-01

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Abstract

Abstract – Drawing on previous research, this study aims to investigate the use of metadiscursive features in the transcripts from trials regarding the crimes of birth-concealing and infanticide committed in England between the 19th and the 20th centuries. Generally, defendant was a young woman who worked as a cook, a lady’s maid, a servant in a house, or a seamstress at a tailor. The transcripts of testimonies are selected from the Old Bailey Proceedings Online, a fully searchable website providing accounts of all the records of crimes committed in London and Middlesex between 1674 and 1913. Seminal works on historical pragmatics (Jucker 2008), research on language and power in court (Maley 2000, Stygall 2001, Cotterill 2003, Heffer 2005, Chaemsaithong 2012), together with influential studies on the historical courtroom discourse (Culpeper and Kytö 2000, Kryk-Kastovsky 2006) have revealed that several differences in the witnesses’ speech production are more often than not, gender and social status related. After a sociopragmatic and historical pragmatic analysis of the social and professional roles of the witnesses involved in the trials in the ad hoc corpora, this work investigates how certain metadiscursive features (Hyland 2005), such as boosters, hedges, and self-mentions, contribute to express certainty, confidence and personal involvement or contrariwise, uncertainty, indecision or hesitation about the statements uttered, and the narratives exposed before judges and lawyers in court. The corpus-driven analysis was supported by a thorough qualitative study of the data, which allowed to draw the conclusions that the interactional metadiscursive strategies used in the testimonies are rhetorical tools that help negotiate identity, credibility, power, gender roles, professional position, and social status in the institutional context under scrutiny.