The Korean Association for the Study of English Language and Linguistics

Korean Journal of English Language and Linguistics - Vol. 22
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Korea Journal of English Language and Linguistics - Vol. 22, No. 0, pp. 1253-1268
Abbreviation: KASELL
ISSN: 1598-1398 (Print) 2586-7474 (Online)
Received 09 Sep 2022 Revised 11 Nov 2022 Accepted 30 Nov 2022
DOI: https://doi.org/10.15738/kjell.22..202211.1253

Speech Comments and Intertextuality: Evidence from Courtroom Discourse
Krisda Chaemsaithong
Professor, Dept. of English Language and Literature, Hanyang University, Tel: 02) 2220-0753 (krisda@hanyang.ac.kr)


© 2022 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.
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Abstract

Underpinned by the assumption that all texts are heteroglossic and polyphonous (Bakhtin 1981), this study proposes to examine an area that has been neglected in the scholarship of intertextuality. Attending to the opening speech event of American criminal trials, this study identifies the forms and functions of common speech comments and explicates the ways in which these comments provide different contextualization cues about how a statement (and other relevant intertextual aspects) should be processed and understood. The findings reveal five common categories of speech comments, and these comments become instrumental for speech presenters to achieve the communicative goals of persuasion in this setting. These speech comments function to mediate both the propositional content of the opening statement as well as negotiate the interpersonal relationship between the presenter and the audience.

Keywords: courtroom discourse, intertextuality, speech comments, speech representation, metacommunication
Acknowledgments

This study was supported by the research fund of Hanyang University (HY-2021). I also thank the anonymous reviewers and the editor for insightful comments.

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