ABSTRACT
Despite the recent spate of excellent textbooks, monographs and review essays on language and law or what is often referred to as forensic linguistics (Conley and O’Barr 2005; Gibbons 2003; Coulthard and Johnson 2007; Travers 2006; Conley 2006; Maynard 2006; Ehrlich 2001; Eades 2008b; Solan and Tiersma 2005), researchers rarely mention the role of bodily conduct and how it relates to language use in legal settings. In fact, the first major textbook in the field, Just Words (now in its second edition) is quite revealing in its title, representative of prevailing sentiments that legal discourse consists solely of verbal conduct. In this chapter I demonstrate that legal discourse involves much more than just words
and that language and embodied conduct work together as co-expressive semiotic partners – as multimodal resources – in utterance construction and the production of meaning in courtroom talk. Although multimodality encompasses written texts, material artefacts, technical devices, gesture and other semiotic forms, I limit my focus in this chapter to gesture, gaze and postural orientation and how these are interwoven into the stream of verbal activity in a rape victim’s narrative during direct examination. Incorporating a broader contextual focus, I also display how multimodal resources function in the ascription of blame, constitution of identity, and the emergence of multiparty participation frameworks in her narrative performance. Focusing on just words neglects the role of multimodal activities in legal proceedings – how both language and embodied conduct mutually contextualize one another in a reciprocal dialectic – and leaves the study of forensic linguistics with an incomplete understanding of legal discourse. To borrow a line from Doug Maynard’s recent work (2006: 477), studying courtroom language without the visual component “loses the phenomena” and erases relevant activities that participants orient to in legal performance. In a similar vein, Jones and LeBaron (2002: 512) note: “To systematically ignore either vocal or visible behaviors in a study of face-to-face interaction is to stunt understanding of the phenomena under investigation.”
And, in his study of legal gestures, Hibbitts (1995: 51) mentions that “a fully-accurate and nuanced understanding of how the law actually works requires an appreciation of other texts in law’s semiotic field.” To provide a more detailed understanding of its significance, I analyze an instance of
multimodal activity from a victim in a rape trial as she addresses motivational issues during redirect examination. As Ehrlich (2001: 108-9) notes, direct examination permits the victim to construct a narrative in her own voice, making the narrative come “alive” and captivate the jury’s attention, in contrast to cross-examination which involves deconstruction by the defence attorney. Re-direct (also called re-examination) examination, in particular, is of crucial significance because it allows the prosecution and victim to rebut the defence attorney’s impeachment from the immediately prior crossexamination. Considered by some as the penultimate moment in the prosecution’s case, the victim’s narrative in this instance creates an emotionally charged moment of high drama as she discusses ulterior motives for going forward with charges against the defendant. But her narrative consists of quite a lot more than just speech. She synchronizes talk, gesture and gaze as co-expressive resources to shape a rhythmically integrated and affective form of persuasive discourse. In the process, she grounds victim resistance in a sophisticated multimodal constellation of multiple participation frames to forge identity, orchestrate epistemic stance and distribute responsibility in the sociolegal organization of sexual assault.1 More generally, we will see how multimodal conduct is brought to bear on the local contingencies confronting the victim’s motivational narrative and the incremental alignments and realignments she deploys to shape a coherent accusation against the defendant, rebutting the defence attorney’s impeachment attempt in the process. The chapter begins with a selective overview of the literature on multimodal resources
(limited to gesture, gaze and postural orientation) and a discussion of the dynamic interplay between speech and bodily conduct in the production of utterances, participation and identity. I discuss theoretical advances in the study of gesture and other forms of bodily conduct to show their relevance and significance for analysing legal discourse, as well as their limitations. The next section provides background information on the rape trial and the motivational issues surrounding the case. The ensuing analysis of motivational data demonstrates not only how multimodal conduct is relevant to the study of the victim’s narrative in direct examination, but also how institutional forms of speech synchronized gestures may reveal novel directions for the study of gesture, gaze and talk as situated forms of activity.
