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Korea Journal of English Language and Linguistics - Vol. 21, No. 0, pp. 359-374 | |
Abbreviation: KASELL | |
ISSN: 1598-1398 (Print) 2586-7474 (Online) | |
Received 08 Mar 2021 Revised 15 Apr 2021 Accepted 25 Apr 2021 | |
DOI: https://doi.org/10.15738/kjell.21..202104.359 | |
The Multiplicity of Self of Capital Trial Lawyers | |
Krisda Chaemsaithong
| |
Professor, Dept. of English, Hanyang University (krisda@hanyang.ac.kr) | |
© 2021 KASELL All rights reserved This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons License, which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. | |
Funding Information ▼ |
Underpinned by Goffman’s concept of footing (1981), this study focuses on deconstructing the kinds of performance in which capital trial lawyers are engaged, when persuading the jurors to kill or spare the defendant on trial. Indexical cues are identified that instantiate the shifts into different speaking roles. The findings suggest that this genre is in fact highly complex and encompasses three layered speaking selves: storyteller, interlocutor, and animator, each of which is foregrounded at different relevant points. In effect, lawyers can emphasize favorable “facts” while silencing others through selective storytelling, fill in evidentiary gaps with inferences, guide the jurors’ interpretation as their active interlocutor, and endorse or invalidate an argument through quotations.
Keywords: alignment, capital trial, footing, speaking role, performance |
This work was supported by funding from Hanyang University (HY-2020).
The author sincerely thanks the reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions.
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