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Article published In: Certainty and Uncertainty in Dialogue
Edited by Andrzej Zuczkowski
[Language and Dialogue 4:1] 2014
► pp. 112–131

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The dialogic construction of certainty in legal contexts

 | University of Bari, Italy
Published online: 20 May 2014
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https://doi.org/10.1075/ld.4.1.07min
The contexts of legal communication are characterized by the maximum strain between the spread of doubtfulness and the aspiration to certainty. The distance between the versions of events proposed by prosecution and defense is clear evidence of the sense-making dynamic that marks the human condition as “insecuritas”. The analysis of legal contexts allows us to capture the complex process of the discursive construction of (un)certainty, that interweaves references on both the epistemic and value axes typical of a specific sense-enunciative community. In the discursive sphere of the “court” institution, all the enunciative positionings enacted by those who incriminate, defend, testify, guarantee and judge, disclose the several ways to relate to (un)certainty of their textual worlds. As a consequence, the meaning of “evidentials” is overdetermined by specific rhetorical structures that set up a wide range of personal styles in the management of (un)certainty . The analysis of texts produced in a judicial debate aims to display the dialogical principle pertaining to a specific modulation of evidentiality expressed by deontic forms, performing a “dehumanizing” rhetoric. They can be interpreted as a trace of the opportunity to emphasize the ethical roots of each claim for certainty.
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