ABSTRACT
This book is about the de®ning and delimiting force of institutional discourse. Analysing the nitty-gritty linguistic details of socially-situated interactions, I have shown how culturally-dominant notions about violence against women penetrate, and circulate within, the talk of sexual assault adjudication processes. Given the institutionally-sanctioned power accorded to questioners (i.e., adjudicators and lawyers) in these settings, such ideologies ± embedded primarily in the presuppositions or (pseudo)assertions of questions ± have a particular potency. That is, because witnesses are `systematically disabled' from asking questions or initiating turns (Hutchby and Woof®tt 1998: 166), their ability to challenge or resist the assumptions encoded in questions is severely limited. To the extent, then, that this discourse is embodied in institutions and subject to institutional (discursive) constraints, it comes to build the character of the events and individuals it represents.
