Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-94fs2 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-05T04:11:11.815Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

“Well, that’s why I asked the question sir”: Well as a discourse marker in court

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 January 2010

BRONWEN INNES
BRONWEN INNES*
Affiliation:
22 Seymour Street, St Mary’s Bay, Auckland, New Zealand, [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article discusses the use of well as a discourse marker in some New Zealand courtrooms. While well has been discussed by many in the past, the data have been selected mainly from small, friendly encounters of various kinds, including sociolinguistic interviews. The study reported on here looks at a very different situation that necessarily involves a range of relationships and includes both cooperative and adversarial activities. It confirms that explanations of well’s use focusing on single strands such as social indicators (e.g. gender) or discourse coherence are simplistic, a more fruitful account being afforded through a multi-pronged functional approach. Finally, the article considers the application of politeness and relevance theory.*

Keywords

Discourse markerscourtroompolitenessrelevance
Type
Research Articles
Information
Language in Society , Volume 39 , Issue 1 , February 2010 , pp. 95 - 117
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Aijmer, Karin (2002). English discourse particles: Evidence from a corpus. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Aijmer, Karin, & Simon-Vandenbergen, Anne-Marie (2003). The discourse particle well and its equivalents in Swedish and Dutch. Linguistics 41:1123–61.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Atkinson, J. Maxwell, & Drew, Paul (1979). Order in court: The organisation of verbal interaction in judicial settings. London: Macmillan.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Berk-Seligsen, Susan (1999). The impact of court interpreting on the coerciveness of leading questions. Forensic Linguistics 6:30–56.Google Scholar
Blakemore, Diane (2002). Relevance and linguistic meaning: The semantics and pragmatics of discourse markers. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bogoch, Bryna, & Danet, Brenda (1984). Challenge and control in lawyer/client interaction: A case study in an Israeli Legal Aid office. Text 4: 249–75.Google Scholar
Brown, Penelope, & Levinson, Steven (1978). Universals in language usage: politeness phenomena. In Goody, Esther (ed.), Questions and politeness: Strategies in social interaction, 156–289. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Buck, Rosemary (1997). Towards an extended theory of face action: Analysing dialogue in E.M. Forster’s “A Passage to India”. Journal of Pragmatics 27:83–106.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cameron, Deborah (2000). Good to talk? Living and working in a communication culture. London: Sage.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cuenca, Maria-Josep (2008). Pragmatic markers in contrast: The case of well. Journal of Pragmatics 40:1373–91.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
De Klerk, Vivian (2005). Procedural meanings of well in a corpus of Xhosa English. Journal of Pragmatics 37:1183–1205.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fischer, Kerstin (2000). From cognitive semantics to lexical pragmatics. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fox, Barbara; Hayashi, M.; & Jasperson, R. (1996). Resources and repair: A cross-linguistic study of syntax and repair. In Ochs, Elinor et al. (eds.), Interaction and grammar, 185–237. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fraser, Bruce (1996). Pragmatic markers. Pragmatics 6:167–90.Google Scholar
Fuller, Janet (2003). The influence of speaker roles on discourse marker use. Journal of Pragmatics 35: 23–45.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Greasley, Peter (1994). An investigation into the use of the particle well: Commentaries on a game of snooker. Journal of Pragmatics 22:477–4.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hale, Sandra (1999). Interpreters’ treatment of discourse markers in courtroom questions. Forensic Linguistics 6:57–2.Google Scholar
Heffer, Chris (2005). The language of jury trial. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Holmes, Janet (1990). Politeness strategies in New Zealand English. In Bell, & Holmes, Janet (eds.), New Zealand ways of speaking English. Wellington: Victoria University Press.Google Scholar
Holmes, Janet, & Stubbe, Maria, 2003. Power and politeness in the workplace. Harlow, UK: Longman.Google Scholar
Holtgraves, Thomas (1997). Yes, but …: Positive politeness in conversation arguments. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 18: 222–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hudson, R.A. (1975). The meaning of questions. Language 51:1–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jary, Mark (1998). Relevance theory and the communication of politeness. Journal of Pragmatics 30:1–19.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jorgensen, Julia (1996). The functions of sarcastic irony. Journal of Pragmatics 26:613–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jucker, Andreas (1993). The discourse marker well: A relevance-theoretical account. Journal of Pragmatics 19:239–52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Labov, William, & Fanshel, David (1997). Therapeutic discourse. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Lane, Christopher (1988). Language on trial. PhD dissertation, University of Auckland.Google Scholar
Lenk, Uta (1998). Discourse markers and global coherence in conversation. Journal of Pragmatics 30:245–57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McHoul, Alec (1997). The philosophical grounds of pragmatics (and vice versa?). Journal of Pragmatics 27:1–15.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mey, Jacob L. (2001). Pragmatics: An introduction. 2nd ed.Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Morris, George; White, Cindy; & Iltis, Robert (1994). ‘Well, ordinarily I would, but’: Reexamining the nature of accounts for problematic events. Research on Language and Social Interaction 27:123–44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Müller, Simone (2004). ‘Well you know that type of person’: Functions of well in the speech of American and German students. Journal of Pragmatics 36:1157–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Muntigl, Peter, & Turnbull, William (1998). Conversational structure and facework in arguing. Journal of Pragmatics 29:225–56.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
O’Barr, William (1982). Linguistic evidence: Language, power and strategy in the courtroom. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
O’Barr, William, & Atkins, Bowman K. (1980). ‘Women’s language’ or ‘powerless language’? In McConnell-Ginet, Sally, Borker, & Furman, (eds.), Women and language in literature and society, 93–110. New York: Praeger.Google Scholar
Redeker, Giselle (1991). Linguistic markers of discourse structure. Linguistics 29:1139–72.Google Scholar
Risselada, Rodei, & Spooren, Wilbert (1998). Introduction: Discourse markers and coherence relations. Journal of Pragmatics 30:131–33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sacks, Harvey; Schegloff, Emmanuel; & Jefferson, Gail (1974). A simplest systematics for the organisation of turn-taking in conversation. Language 50:696–735.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sai-Hua, Kua (1994). Agreement and disagreement strategies in a radio conversation. Research on Language and Social Interaction 27:95–122.Google Scholar
Schiffrin, Deborah (1987). Discourse markers. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schiffrin, Deborah (1994). Approaches to discourse. Malden, MA: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Stubbe, Maria; Lane, Chris; Hilder, Jo; Vine, Elaine; Vine, Bernadette; Marra, Meredith; Holmes, Janet; & Weatherall, Ann (2003). Multiple discourse analyses of a workplace interaction. Discourse Studies 5:351–88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar