ABSTRACT
Much work on linguistic disadvantage in court has focused on the asymmetrical speaking rights of legal and lay participants, with witnesses suffering ‘narrative inequality,’ as Dell Hymes put it, with respect to the examining lawyer. However, even when witnesses are allowed to ‘have their say’, they are often not ‘heard’ by the rhetorical audience of jury and/or judge, in the sense that what they say is not ‘taken up’, grasped or responded to in their own terms. This chapter applies Chris Heffer’s Voice Projection Framework to three different forensic contexts where there is a notable disconnect between voicing and hearing. First, it demonstrates the deliberate suppression of another’s voice in the institutional context of cross-examination. Then, it notes how voice can be silenced, not necessarily deliberately, through the process of entextualisation (the transformation of total speech into divisible text) in the transcription of culturally ‘other’ speakers. Finally, it considers how a voice can simply fail to project even when conveyed by a powerful speaker such as a judge. The overall argument is that an understanding of voice, both structurally and agentively, is central to an understanding of communicational uptake.
