Despite the relevance of language use in expert testimony, researchers have rarely scrutinized the linguistic and interactional processes of constructing an expert identity. This study, rather than reifying the concept of expert and leaving it as an unproblematic legal argument, examines how this institutional identity emerges in and through discursive interaction between the prosecuting attorney and a physician (who is also the defendant) in trial cross-examination. Using Goffman's notion of footing, the article examines how both prosecutor and defendant mobilize direct and indirect quotes, repetitive parallelism, epistemic modality, counterfactuals, evidentiality, sequencing, and specialized tokens of the medical register to contextualize shifting into and departing from an expert identity. (Footing, experts, contextualization, verbal performance, legal discourse, grammar in sequential action.)*

In this article I examine the applied relevance of trial talk for rape shield legislation and attempts to evaluate the impact of such legal reforms. Using linguistic data from the Kennedy Smith rape trial, I argue that attempts to progressively implement rape shield have thus far failed and that research evaluating its impact has been more or less misguided because reformers and researchers have consistently failed to scrutinize empirically the interactional object to which rape shield legislation is applied: the language of evidence in testimony. Looking at the social construction of rape's legal facticity, I propose new methods of interpreting and evaluating legal reforms based on an understanding of language use and the performance of knowledge in context.

This paper illustrates how stance functions as a semiotic resource that feeds into and mediates institutional context. I consider stance not only as linguistic expression but as interactive, bodily engagement, synchronized in multimodal layers of participation. Using data from a focus group interview, I examine how stance emerges in the collaborative rhythms of linguistic, paralinguistic and, most prominently, embodied conduct between speaker and listener to index socio-cultural knowledge about the jurisdictional division of labor among legal professionals. Drawing on Charles Frake's classic 'Struck by speech,' I illustrate not only how a speaker strikes his listener with speech, but also how the body of the listener displays being struck.

This article examines a questioning strategy in trial crossexamination designed to control an evasive witness, and how that control functions through the interactive contours of verbal and visual conduct to index identity, construct multidimensional forms of participation and project intertextual relations. In the process of nailing down an answer, attorney and witness manipulate linguistic ideologies and project participations of power to calibrate the epistemological criteria for determining the legitimacy of legal realities. I demonstrate how indexical iconicities of trial dialogic form emerge as a contested ritual of truth in the situated details of multimodal discursive practices.

Despite the growing importance of focus group interviews for the evaluation of new legal mandates, we know very little about how these interviews function in the socially situated and concrete details of communicative practice. Consequently, how such practices mediate our interpretation and assessment of legal policy remains an unexplicated topic of social scientific inquiry. This study explores the role of verbal and nonverbal speech in a focus group interview designed to help evaluate community-policing outcomes. We begin by discussing the linguistic ideologies of focus groups and show how these presuppositions shape the interaction among focus group moderator, members of the evaluation team and community interviewees. The remaining parts of the article demonstrate how a communicative misalignment emerges in the production and interpretation of verbal and nonverbal activities — a state of crosstalk with stark consequences for the assessment of legal change. By focusing on the interpenetration of language and the body in the contextualization of meaning, we outline an approach that allows researchers to track the elusive, yet crucial, relationship between legal process and outcome.