Status Positions of Courtroom Discourse Participants

Abstract

Abstract-The article describes some characteristics of courtroom discourse participants, namely institutional status of a person and its correlations with other statuses in the courtroom communicative space, modality of communicative acts and speech formula, which belong to the courtroom discourse. The social status of a person, as the basic concept in sociology and sociolinguistics, was described by Weber, Parsons, Abrahamson, Bernstein, Harms. In this article, it has been analyzed from the point of view of pragmalinguistics as it is understood by Solan, Karasik, Eades, Wagner, Cheng. The pragmalinguistic approach to the study of the status of a person participating in court proceedings aims to reveal the situational characteristics of equality or inequality relations in courtroom. Status positions of courtroom discourse participants find reflections in certain participant types and communicative trajectories in communicative space, speech act types and their combinations, norms of verbal and non-verbal behavior and rules of communication, speech etiquette conventions, speech acts modality, communicative roles, reaction to role performance, interactional discrimination.

On the Issue of Polite Appeals and Blessings in Indian English

“…Knowledge of the English language is an indicator of a person's good education and as a rule it gives a higher social status. It implies institutional, systematic relations based on norms (external towards direct social interaction) [10].…”