| This dissertation is a critical analysis of the sociolinguistic choices lawyers make in the closing arguments of criminal trials to construct opposing representations of the same people and events. I analyzed the closing arguments of seventeen felony trials using both quantitative and qualitative methodologies and the insights of Critical Discourse Analysis, Systemic Functional Linguistics, and Linguistic Anthropology. Based on the results of four analyses, I argue that opposing lawyers use their linguistic and discursive choices contrastively to silence (Huckin 2002), background, and foreground different information.;The first analysis examined the lawyers' terms of reference for the defendants and the victims. As the prosecution and defense lawyers consistently differed in the types of terms they used, they systematically constructed divergent identities for the same social actors. The opposing sides silenced and foregrounded different characteristics of the actors and the roles they played. The second analysis studied the representation of the roles the defendants and the victims played in different narratives in each of the arguments. It demonstrated that the lawyers each foregrounded, backgrounded and silenced different actors in the relevant narratives; silenced the defendants' and the victims' roles in processes the other side included, and silenced characteristics of the processes that the other side highlighted (Lakoff and Johnson 1980) through their lexical choices. Through these three processes, the two sides created contrastive narratives. The third analysis examined the use of pronouns in the negotiation of the relationships between the jurors and the lawyers. The results showed that the defense lawyers foregrounded the jurors in their arguments more than the prosecution lawyers did. Also, both sides used personal pronouns to silence differences in social status between the lawyers and the jurors and between the defense lawyers and the defendants, as well as to silence any doubts the jurors may have foregrounded the jurors in their arguments more than the prosecution lawyers did. Also, both sides used personal pronouns to silence differences in social status between the lawyers and the jurors and between the defense lawyers and the defendants, as well as to silence any doubts the jurors may have had. The final analysis studied the functions of character voices (Koven 2002). Lawyers re-animated different discourses especially when they used them to utilize the authority of the original author of the voice to legitimate (van Leeuwen 2007) their claims. They also silenced the voices that added support to the other side's argument. As all of these results demonstrate, the lawyers created opposing arguments by silencing, backgrounding, and foregrounding different topics and information through their contrastive linguistic and their discursive choices.;The importance of this work is three-fold. First, for the field of Forensic Linguistics, this dissertation offers important empirical insights into the use of language in the closing arguments. As a genre, the closing arguments have been understudied. This dissertation offers a systematic account of the linguistic forms prosecution and defense lawyers consistently use and the function of these forms in the creation of the relevant narratives and t argumentative discourses. Second, this dissertation contributes to sociolinguistic theory in that it demonstrates that silencing, backgrounding, and foregrounding are discursive processes that are simultaneously negotiated through multiple sociolinguistic mechanisms, specifically the thematic, lexical, and syntactic processes speakers make. This study also showed that the functions of these processes in the creation of discourses is a result of the ideological biases and mental models of the speaker. Third, the methodological approaches utilized here combined the insights of several distinct fields, and they also integrated both quantitative and qualitative analyses. Not only did they provide a more nuanced analysis for this particular project, but they also demonstrated new ways of examining data for future research. |
