DHondt2009b
| DHondt2009b | |
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| BibType | ARTICLE |
| Key | DHondt2009b |
| Author(s) | Sigurd D'hondt |
| Title | Good cops, bad cops: Intertextuality, agency, and structure in criminal trial discourse |
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| Tag(s) | EMCA, Courtroom Interaction, Accountability |
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| Year | 2009 |
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| Journal | Research on Language and Social Interaction |
| Volume | 42 |
| Number | 3 |
| Pages | 249-275 |
| URL | Link |
| DOI | 10.1080/08351810903089183 |
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Abstract
This article investigates how the institutionality of interaction is discursively accounted for in a judicial setting, a Belgian first-instance criminal case in which four defendants are accused of verbal assault on a police officer and resisting arrest. The article traces how the prosecutor and the defense attorney successively describe the incident that led to the defendants' arrest, and how they thereby demonstrate/invalidate the applicability of the charges brought against them. As a consequence of the specific linguistic-interactional nature of the charges (which transforms the process of reporting the incident into an accountable phenomenon), institutionality must in these descriptions be simultaneously accounted for at two different levels in order for the charges to be upheld. These levels are that of the reported event (Did the arrest take place in conformity with established police procedures? Did the arresting police officers act appropriately?) and that of the reporting event (the role played by the prosecutor in the trial—as interpreter of the case file and principal of the discourse, or merely as the animator of what is said). The analysis shows that ascriptions of agency and structure play an important role in this process of accounting for institutionality. The trial participants make sense of (and dispute) the institutionality of interactional conduct in terms of a dichotomy between the constraints exerted by social structure on the one hand and individual voluntarism on the other.
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