Edited by Dennis Kurzon and Barbara Kryk-Kastovsky
The volume Legal Pragmatics is a contribution to the interface between language and law. It looks at how the principles of language use can be beneficial to clarifying legal issues, its twelve chapters (together with the Introduction) offering a wide spectrum of the latest approaches to the area of… read more
This paper studies the role of conversational implicatures in the 17th century courtroom discourse. My hypothesis is that the use of the literal vs. non-literal language runs along the distinction between the powerless interrogated (the defendant, the witnesses) and the powerful interrogators… read more
Kurzon, Dennis and Barbara Kryk-Kastovsky 2018 IntroductionLegal Pragmatics, Kurzon, Dennis and Barbara Kryk-Kastovsky (eds.), pp. 1–18 | Chapter
The paper discusses power in Early Modern English courtroom. A few levels of linguistic analysis are examined for the occurrence of the exponents of power. As regards lexicon, it is the specific vocabulary which creates the social distance between the interrogators and the interrogated. My… read more
The paper investigates whether the notion of impoliteness worked out for synchronic pragmatics is also applicable in diachronic pragmatics. An analysis of two Early Modern English court trial records demonstrates that the answer is positive provided some new dimensions are added. My model of… read more
The paper aims at answering some questions essential for a historical pragmaticist. It examines to what extent the written records available nowadays reflect the language spoken in the past, i.e. what their degree of orality is. The data are two Early Modern English texts: The trial of Titus… read more
