Transitivity, no stone left unturned: Introducing flexibility and granularity into the framework for the analysis of courtroom discourse

Abstract

This PhD thesis, entitled TRANSITIVITY, no stone left unturned: Introducing flexibility and granularity into the framework for the analysis of courtroom discourse, considers four main areas, to include Critical Discourse Analysis, Corpus Linguistics, Forensic Linguistics (FL) and Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). As features of SFL, the two transitivity models put forward to date, i.e. the Sydney model (Halliday, 1985, 1994; Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004, 2014) and the Cardiff model (Fawcett, 1987, 2000; Neale, 2002) are critiqued here and, in turn, a revised transitivity network is proposed. Using the new framework, we analyse a piece of courtroom discourse in which a man finds himself accused and, subsequently, wrongly convicted of raping a minor. Thus, the intention is to determine the language patterns employed by particular individuals involved in the court case (i.e. the lawyers for both sides and the victim) as a means to verify the impact that their questioning and/or testimony may have had on the defendant’s untimely fate. To add to this, a well established SFL theory, namely Appraisal, is also employed here for the analysis of the lawyers’ closing arguments. This is aimed at gaining further insights into the types of evaluation that emerge in their discourse and, thus, uncover the potential bearing this may have had on the outcome of the trial at hand. We hope that this study will serve as a contribution to the current shortage of SFL research within the field of FL.