In Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), the system of Transitivity is a common means by which to analyse both isolated clauses as well as clauses in context. To date, two Transitivity models have emerged. The first and more established of the two is the
Courtroom language is renowned for being strategic and a powerful means of manipulation, which may explain why criminal cases can sometimes result in a wrongful conviction. One such case is examined here, whereby an innocent man is convicted by a jury for the rape of a minor. Through a look at the closing arguments by the prosecution and defence attorneys, we can gain insights into why the defendant finds himself wrongly convicted of sexual assault. To show how the accused and others are portrayed, a combination of Critical Discourse Analysis and corpus linguistics is employed, with special attention paid to the transitivity patterns present in the dataset.
Linguistic modality is the expression of the speaker’s subjectivity including possibility, probability, necessity, obligation, permission, prohibition, and desire. This paper analyses a learner English corpus collected at two Spanish universities, paying special attention to which linguistic devices (e.g., modal verbs, adjectives, adverbs or nouns) English as a Foreign Language (EFL) students make use of when providing for and against arguments in their assignments. Applying a corpus-based methodology not only enabled comparisons to be made with other native and non-native data but also facilitated both quantitative and qualitative analyses. The findings show remarkable similarities and differences, and leave several issues at stake: the relationship between the degree of assertiveness of a text and (1) the student’s gender, (2) their command of the Foreign Language (FL), and (3) their familiarity with the genre they are expected to write in.
It is common knowledge that language use inside the courtroom is an effective tool of persuasion; thus, even in cases where evidence is unreliable, men and women have found themselves facing charges, standing trial and, in the worst case scenario, wrongfully convicted of a crime. In this paper I examine one such case, in which a young American finds himself accused and, later, imprisoned for the rape of a minor, despite evidence to suggest otherwise. The case is taken from a database set up by The Innocence Project, a non-profit organisation comprising a team of volunteers working towards proving the innocence of over 200 individuals currently serving time for a crime that they insist they did not commit. More specifically, my analytical focus is on the closing arguments of the selected case for the purposes of acquiring insights into how the attorneys for each side make particular language choices in a final attempt to maximise the credibility of their version of events. To reveal how the defendant and the victim are portrayed by each of the lawyers and, moreover, whose feelings and/or character traits are brought to the forefront, an Appraisal analysis is carried out on the dataset.
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