Volume 7, Issue 1 - Im/politeness and Facework across Legal Contexts

In this introductory essay, I outline some of the studies which have already explored facework and im/politeness in legal contexts: specifically, Lakoff (Multilingua 8: 101–29, 1989), Penman (Facework and politeness: Multiple goals in courtroom discourse, Multilingual Matters, 1990), Archer (Verbal aggression and impoliteness: Related or synonymous, Mouton de Gruyter, 2008, under review), Limberg (Threats in conflict talk: Impoliteness and manipulation, Mouton de Gruyter, 2008) and Harris (Discourse and Society 12: 451–72, forthcoming 2011). Having suggested ways in which these studies have helped to shape and advance current thinking on facework and im/politeness, in both legal contexts and also more generally, I move on to outline the papers in this special edition, and the issues raised therein.

This paper offers an investigation into the general message structure and politeness strategies used in email communications between (now convicted) paedophiles in discussions of highly illegal practices and intent. In these emails, the interactants reveal telling characteristics of their ‘community of practice’. Consistent with the view from cognitive anthropology (Wenger, Communities of practice: Learning, meaning, and identity, Cambridge University Press, 1998, IVEY Business Journal, 2004) and sociolinguistic research (Eckert, Linguistic variation as social practice, Blackwell, 2000; Newell-Jones, Whose reality counts? Interprofessional learning through the eyes of Participatory Rural Appraisal, Academy of Higher Education, LTSN. Academy of Higher Education, Health Sciences and Practice, 2005), the members of this speech community signal their ‘in group’ membership and values through a number of linguistic strategies, such as lexical and topic choices. Through these choices, members can not only quickly detect non-members, but can focus on those factors that are central to their community (in this case, avoiding features of talk, such as banter, sarcasm or humour, that are risky in new, internet relationships but would mark more solid relationships). The body of email data used for this research is a corpus taken from a recent paedophile case in the UK. Despite the relatively small dataset, many emails are captured in discourse ‘strings’ (i. e., multiple messages between users, embedded within single emails) and thus capture the consecutive to-and-fro of discourse between these discussants. As such we have clear evidence of the progress between contributions and it is clear how quickly members of this speech community discuss sensitive information, and how quickly they seek to ‘meet up’, despite knowing very little about each other. These data are also packed with descriptive information about the wants, deeds and desires of the email senders, making this a particularly rich corpus. We argue that facework and politeness ought to be considered in the light of the overall target social objectives, rather than how we, or members of other social groups, might perceive such discourse contributions.

Kurzon (Journal of Pragmatics 33: 61–85, 2001: 64) argues that the language of the courtroom is inherently polite due to the formal, high stakes context, but does this extend to all the institutional participants throughout trials? The linguistic politeness (and impoliteness) literature gives us a nuanced account of politeness activity (e. g., Culpeper, Journal of Pragmatics 25: 349–367, 1996; Harris, Discourse and Society 12: 451–472: 2001), including “expressive politeness” (Eelen, Pragmatics 9: 163–173, 1999) and “mock politeness” (Kienpointner, Journal of Politeness Research 4: 243–265, 2008: 249). We argue that any analysis of courtroom trial interaction needs to take account of the “multiple goals” (Penman, Facework and politeness: Multiple goals in courtroom discours, Multilingual Matters, 1990; Archer, Verbal aggression and impoliteness: Related or synonymous?, Mouton de Gruyter, 2008) of this “complex genre” (Heffer, The language of jury trial: A corpus-aided analysis of legallay discourse, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005) and, in doing so, we need to account for the inherently facethreatening nature of cross-examination. Drawing on Brown and Levinson's (Universals in language usage: Politeness phenomena, Cambridge University Press, 1978) notion of positive and negative face, we focus on how lawyers and witnesses use “politeness as a strategic act” and how they prioritize the “individual, creative aspects of politeness over the social aspects” (Christie, Journal of Politeness Research 3: 269–294, 2007: 263), to coerce, undermine and challenge. We use a corpus-based approach to investigate the case of the libel trial David Irving vs. Penguin Books Ltd and Deborah Lipstadt (2000). This paper examines direct and indirect impoliteness, arguing that pragmatic im/politeness strategies contribute to the style of the lawyer's defensive attack in cross-examination, one which employs both polite and impolite incivility.

This paper explores the 1895 libel trial between Oscar Wilde (literary personality) and the Marquis of Queensbury (father of Wilde's close friend). Focussing on the lead defence counsel's cross-examination of Wilde (plaintiff), I demonstrate that Carson's FTAs are “aggressive” and, in some cases, “deliberately” so (cf. Bousfield, Impoliteness in interaction, John Benjamins, 2008: 72). However, as they do not breach the rules of the courtroom or involve an overt “intent to harm” (Goffman, Interaction ritual: Essays on face-to-face behaviour, Pantheon Books, 1967: 14), I argue that they do not constitute impoliteness. I further argue that Carson's FTAs should not be considered “incidental” in nature, given they were more planned and more anticipated than Goffman's (Interaction ritual: Essays on face-to-face behaviour, Pantheon Books, 1967: 14) definition seems to allow, and thus suggest that Carson's FTAs be recognized as sitting somewhere between Goffman's intentional or incidental levels – thanks, in part, to their manipulation of multiple goals (Penman, Facework and politeness: Multiple goals in courtroom discourse, Multilingual Matters Ltd., 1990) – in what I have labelled the ambiguous-as-to-speaker-intent zone (Archer under review). I also demonstrate Carson's use/manipulation of representational frames and reality paradigms so as to emphasize Wilde's moral “deviance”. In brief, a reality paradigm equates to “the systems of beliefs [and] values … by reference to which a person or a society comprehends the world” (Fowler, Linguistic criticism, Oxford University Press, 1986: 130), and representational frames, to the way(s) in which interlocutors opt to “represent the character traits, ideas and opinions of and even statements made by others” (Locher and Watts, Relational work and impoliteness: Negotiating norms of linguistic behaviour, Mouton de Gruyter, 2008: 99, n9). I conclude by responding to two questions highlighted by my investigation: (1) Should we be talking about impoliteness in the courtroom (even when investigating the cross-examination phase)? and (2) To what extent can our understanding of facework be enhanced, in both a courtroom context and more generally, via a consideration of reality paradigms (and their strategic manipulation)?

This paper takes as its focus the relationship between power and impoliteness in the arraignment section of seventeenth-century trials. Two sources are examined in this regard: The State Trials and The Old Bailey's Proceedings Online. Drawing on Archer's distinction between impoliteness and verbal aggression (2008) and on Culpeper's classification of behavioural norms (2008), this study analyzes facework dynamics in cases where defendants refused to plead unless the court first proved the legitimacy of its procedure. This generated an escalation of face-threats which turned the courtroom into an arena of conflictual discourse. In order to establish whether and to what extent the power confrontation between professionals and defendants was related to the status of the prisoner and/or the seriousness of the crime committed, three types of court cases are taken into consideration: treason trials involving defendants of high status, cases of religious subversion where defendants are upper and middle class Quakers and trials for ordinary crimes (robbery and housebreaking) involving lower class prisoners. The analysis reveals that both upper and lower status defendants attempted to resist the reified power of the authorities, albeit for different reasons. It is also argued that the way in which judges and Attorney Generals construed the prisoners' requests to be heard as impolite/improper testifies to: (i) the high deference expectation of the court and (ii) the professionals' design to frame the prisoner as a subversive individual capable of committing the crime for which he was indicted. By and large, the dataset shows that seventeenth-century defendants were required to conform to a pleading script which – being necessarily detrimental to their cause – cast them in a no-win situation from the very beginning of the trial.

This study describes the facework system in effect during oral argument in US state supreme courts. Drawing on two cases that occurred in the California Supreme Court in which attorneys and justices explored the legality of California's marriage laws, the study argues that the facework system in operation during oral argument is one of minimal politeness. That facework system, one that uses selected address forms, argument meta-language, case references, and frequent interruptions that go unmarked, constructs an impersonal, professional face in which politeness is uncalled for. The first part of the analysis illustrates the features and suggests how these discourse features do their interpretive work. The second part of the analysis examines a deviant case: an exchange where an attorney and the justices gave significant attention to each others' positive face. The paper uses the deviant case to make clear what the typical facework in appellate oral argument looks like, as well as to give a sense of appellate procedures when that norm is altered. The conclusion draws out implications for future face and politeness theorizing.