Publication details
Question Type and Narrative Construction in Courtroom Interrogation
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| Year of publication | 2012 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
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| Description | The paper presents the results of research into the patterns of questioning in courtroom interrogation, based on a sample of minor witness testimonies made in court during a high profile civil case in the USA. Approaching the data from the perspective of conversational analysis, the paper concentrates on the question part of the question-answer adjacency pair, contrasting the use of this structural component in direct and cross examination. It is shown that there is a significant difference between the two examination phases concerning the interrogators’ preferences for the individual structural forms of questions (question types). This observation is explained with reference to the different functions of the two types of interrogation, reflecting their role in the construction of contrasting versions of events or, in some cases, the destruction of an alternative account. The same structural form can thus be used in different phases with entirely different functions that are ultimately related to the general macrostructural context of the speech event on the one hand and the questioner’s possible strategies of narrative construction on the other. |