In the past four decades the study of legal language has been carried out by scholars in a number of academic disciplines including law, linguistics, psychology, anthropology, political science and sociology. Research has often been pursued by scholars affiliated with the social sciences, since legal language is a socially-situated phenomenon. The law, as a social institution expressing the rules and regulations of a society, governs a special relationship between the individual and the society. Generally, laws are codified in legal documents that are created and implemented by legal professionals. These professionals are part of a society's legal infrastructure, which is focused on organizing and regulating the system of penalties for breaking laws, or, from another perspective, on pursuing justice. As legal scholars have pointed out, the drafting of laws and regulations is a linguistic matter, since one must neither say too much, resulting in an overly strict legal code, nor say too little, which may result in unacceptable behaviors (Gibbons 1994: 3). The system that begins with the creation of laws and up through any sort of enforcement in a court of law operates entirely through language, and this is one of the reasons that the law is an attractive topic for linguists. The complex links between language and society, and the form and content of law hold special interest for linguists interested in pragmatics.
When we turn to the language of the courtroom in particular, it is obvious upon reflection, for instance, that the term "courtroom discourse" encompasses many different kinds of spoken and written language: the verbal interaction in a trial among all participants (judges, lawyers, witnesses, defendants, etc.), judges' instructions to juries, sentencing, lawyer talk, depositions, testimonies, evidence, etc. Whether the focus is on spoken language in the courtroom or on its attendant written documents, the idea of the courtroom assumes interaction among participants. The legal domain, and especially courtroom discourse, thus offers linguists a wide arena for carrying out pragmatic and contextually-oriented research, and this line of work has blossomed over the past two decades.
Rather than attempting to cover the large field of language and the law, this chapter surveys representative articles and monographs that explore various aspects of courtroom discourse from a historical pragmatic perspective. Of course, even the field called historical pragmatics is large and contains diverse approaches and foci (for recent overviews, see the introduction to this handbook, as well as Taavitsainen and Fitzmaurice 2007; Jucker 2008). Thus, the inclusions are selected on the basis of their examination of pragmatic aspects of interaction and the focus on either diachronic changes or synchronic exploration of particular discourse fea-

scihub/10.1515/9783110214284.7.621.pdf

Handbooks of pragmatics Vol. 8. Historical pragmatics / ed. by Andreas H. Jucker ; Irma Taavitsainen

Historical Pragmatics (Handbooks of Pragmatics [Hops])

edited by Andreas H. Jucker, Irma Taavitsainen

Saur, K. G., Verlag. ein Imprint der Walter de Gruyter GmbH

düsseldorf university press. in Walter de Gruyter GmbH

de Gruyter, Walter, GmbH

Mouton de Gruyter

Handbooks of pragmatics -- v. 8, Berlin, New York, Germany, 2010

De Gruyter, Berlin, 2010

Germany, Germany

1, 2010

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Includes bibliographical references and indexes.

This new landmark series of nine self-contained handbooks provides a comprehensive and up-to-date overview of the entire field of pragmatics. It is based on a wide conception of pragmatics as the study of intentional human interaction in social and cultural contexts. The series reflects, appraises and structures a field that is exceptionally vast, unusually heterogeneous and still rapidly expanding. In-depth articles by leading experts from around the world discuss the foundations, major theories and most recent developments of pragmatics including philosophical, cognitive, sociocultural, contrastive and diachronic perspectives

The Handbook of Historical Pragmatics provides an authoritative and accessible overview of this versatile new field in pragmatics devoted to a diachronic study of language use and human interaction in context. It covers all areas of historical pragmatics from grammaticalization theory to pragmatic entities, such as discourse markers, speech acts and politeness to individual discourse domains from scientific writing to literary discourse. Each contribution, written by a leading specialist, gives a succinct, representative and up-to-date overview of research questions, theories, methods and recent developments in the field.