ABSTRACT
The closing arguments of trials in adversarial legal systems are important sites of investigation both for discourse analysis in general and for forensic linguistics specifically. During the closing arguments, two speakers take the same people, events, and evidence, and create two opposing representations for the same audience. Understanding how this occurs can reveal how speakers’ goals and belief systems affect their use of language. Additionally, these discourses are both persuasive and argumentative, thus providing a prime opportunity to study how such discourses are linguistically created. In addition to these aspects, closing arguments are especially interesting for forensic
discourse analysis for several other reasons. First, the closing arguments are the lawyers’ final chances to convince the judge or jurors that theirs is the best account of what really happened; the last chance to put together their most complete and coherent “master narrative” (Gibbons 2003: 155) of the crime, investigation, and the trial. Second, the lawyers produce their argument without having to interact with witnesses. Thus, the arguments are free of outside influences which could affect the lawyers’ discourses and language use. Finally, unlike during the examination of witnesses, in the closing arguments lawyers now get to speak directly to the people they are trying to convince. Research into closing arguments has taken two general focuses: what information or
message is included, that is, the ideational content (Halliday 1978) and how lawyers negotiate their interpersonal relationships, that is, the construction of the speaker’s role through modality, person, voice (Bakhtin 1981), footings (Goffman 1981b), style, etc. (Halliday 1978). Section two of this chapter presents a discussion of research on the ideational content of closing arguments, specifically the work that has been done on the ways in which lawyers create opposing discourses when starting from the same people and events. The third section in this chapter discusses research that has shown that in the closing arguments lawyers must manage multiple aspects of their identity: both their position of authority and their similarities to the jurors. In section four, I then present an analysis of lawyers’ use of quotations to show how a single forensic discourse analysis can explore both the ideational and interpersonal aspects of closing arguments. The final
section provides a summary of the results of this analysis and directions for further research.
