| With a corpus of data comprising portions of five court trials, this study examines how indirectness is employed by attorneys during direct examination and whether various social factors affect the frequency and motivation of indirectness in questioning. These social factors include attorney and witness gender, as well as the status of witnesses. A distinction is made in the study between various types of indirect expressions and the effect they have on witnesses, as well as how these forms may be used strategically to give members of the jury favorable impressions of certain witnesses. |
