Performing self on the witness stand: Stance and relational work in expert witness testimony

Abstract

Underpinned by the assumption that social categorizations emerge from discursive practices performed within the interactional context, this study examines the discursive process in which an expert witness constructs and negotiates persuasive courtroom accounts. Using insights from the concept of 'footing' and the framework of stance and engagement, this study reveals the ways in which an expert witness calls upon a range of interactional devices to appropriate the desired footing and labeling category. The findings suggest that instead of asserting their dominance and expertise over the interlocutors, experts construct and negotiate their identity by aligning with other participants and establishing a relationship with them. All this is done within the broad constraints of courtroom discourse.

Dramatic monologues

“…In the case of witness examination, Matoesian (1999Matoesian ( , 2001) carefully examines how the defendant in a rape trial, who was a medical student in the final year and who was not tendered as an expert in the eyes of the public, shifted into and departed from an expert medical identity, as he was impeaching the expert witness's technical account of how the victim could have sustained injuries during the alleged rape. Also focusing on the issue of expert witnesses, Chaemsaithong (2012a) argues that while expert witnesses in the courtroom are equipped with social status and educational or professional qualifications, these privileges do not come uncontested in the courtroom. In particular, experts are faced with how they can best explain the analysis and express the derived opinions to an audience of legal and lay professionals.…”

Double stance discourse: Managing social and personal identity at work

“…The concept of stance has been used to understand how speakers position themselves with respect to the form or content of their utterances. As neutrality is, in itself, a stance (Jaffe, 2009: 3), it can be observed in a wide range of discourse practices and genres, such as journalistic and media discourse (Haddington, 2007; Marín Arrese, 2015; Paterson et al, 2016), threatening discourse (Gales, 2011), courtroom discourse (Chaemsaithong, 2012), organizational discourses (McEntee-Atalianis, 2013) and workplace narratives (Holmes, 2005; Holmes and Marra, 2005; Vásquez, 2007). From a methodological point of view, analytical perspectives are also heterogeneous, ranging from conversation analysis to corpus linguistics, as shown in recent books on the matter of stance in academic genres (Sancho Guinda and Hyland, 2012), qualitative sociolinguistics (Jaffe, 2009) and pragmatics and conversation analysis (Englebretson, 2007, ed.…”

“…Identity, as ‘the social positioning of self and other’ (Bucholtz and Hall, 2005: 586), emerges not only in the interpersonal relation with others, but also in conflict and negotiation with others (Paterson et al, 2016). Chaemsaithong (2012) sees the collective dimension of stancetaking as a process of co-orienting ‘personal or social attitudes towards the referential information being presented in the discourse’ (p. 470).…”

Description, Evaluation and Stance: Exploring the Forms and Functions of Speech Descriptors in Early Modern English

“…Stance has received increasing attention in scholarship on the history of English. Studies have demonstrated that a broad range of features perform stance functions and that language users make strategic use of them for a variety of sociopragmatic purposes (e.g., Fitzmaurice 2003;Biber 2004;Levorato 2009;Busse 2010;Gray, Biber and Hiltunen 2011;Chaemsaithong 2012;Grund 2014). More specifically, stance has been considered in relation to speech representation (primarily in research on present-day contexts).…”