The Courtroom Hearing as a Middle Ground: Speech Accommodation by Lawyers and Defendants

Abstract

A criminal court trial may be characterised in terms of interactional asymmetry and by largely conflicting goals and interests on the part of the principal actors. It is also an arena where different linguistic varieties and modes of interaction meet. In this paper, we analyse Swedish court hearings as a middle ground where actors, defendants as well as legal professionals, attenuate a number of differences in their respective discourse styles, e.g. as regards vocabulary and information density. Despite what defendants claim in interviews, they themselves attenuate their colloquial jargons when they speak to judges and lawyers in courts. At the other side, legal professionals routinely change their language considerably as they move from the monological phases of the trials to the rather informal dialogical phases (hearings), in which they directly interact with defendants. Furthermore, professionals are also shown to accommodate to the linguistic styles of individual defendants (as regards level of information density). Results are interpreted in terms of speech accommodation theory and provide support for the validity of the theory for authentic interaction in real social life.