Reading aloud and phonological variation in the courtroom

Urbana-Champaign

Simposio; Sociolinguistics Symposium(SoSy 23) - University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; 2023

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

From the theoretical perspective of interactional sociolinguistics (Blommaert, 2019, 2018, 2005; Eckert, 2005; Carranza & Vidal, 2013), I examine aspects of phonological variation in an institutional context. The data corpus comes from a criminal trial that took place in the jurisdiction of the city of Córdoba, Argentina, in 2011. For this study, the selected subcorpus includes face-to-face interactions that took place during the examination and cross-examination of lay-witnesses. These interactions are characterized by the fact that the institutional participant combines questions with the reading aloud of written documents whose content and forms are attributed to the lay-witness on the stand. Previous research on this matter include (author/s) (2015), Matoesian (2012, 2010), (author/s) (2014), among others. Given the nature of the data, i.e., natural and spontaneous texts produced during the course of the habitual activities carried out in the administration of justice, the theoretical perspective selected is that proposed by Coupland (2010, 2001), Eckert (2019, 2016, 2012) and Beltrama (2018), among others, who postulate that linguistic variation is a situated phenomenon that is subject to strategic manipulation. I first examine the impact of the discursive activity at hand in the frequency of ocurrence of phonological standard and non-standard variants associated with the following variables (s), (r), (ɾ), and (d). Results indicate that, during the lay-witness examination phase, all categories of institutional participants tend to use standard phonological variants more often during the reading aloud of statements than when they are not reading, which is consistent with Labov?s pioneering work on stylistic variation. However, the presiding judge and the prosecutor use standard variants more often than the defense lawyer. This discursive behavior can be explained on the basis of the social networks (Milroy & Milroy, 1983) that presiding judges and prosecutors construct in their professional life. Then, conducting a qualitative analysis and considering the realization of (s), I analyze the ocurrence of [s] (a standard phonological variant in the local variety) in cases of reading aloud. I argue that the use of this standard variant can?t be fully accounted for unless the situated functions of reading aloud are considered. The reading aloud of statements is used to challenge the version of the past that the lay-witness defends. Therefore, the careful pronunciations are not related to the the activity of reading aloud per se, but to the orientation to the interlocutor?s contributions and the communicative goals an institutional participant pursues. In the conclusions, I discuss the conexion between reading aloud written texts and phonological variation, as well as the benefits of combining quantitative and qualitative analysis in the study of institutional discourse.