The sociolinguistic construction of reality in the closing arguments of criminal trials

Abstract

This dissertation is a critical analysis of the sociolinguistic choices lawyers make in the closing arguments of criminal trials to construct opposing representations of the same people and events. I analyzed the closing arguments of seventeen felony trials using both quantitative and qualitative methodologies and the insights of Critical Discourse Analysis, Systemic Functional Linguistics, and Linguistic Anthropology. Based on the results of four analyses, I argue that opposing lawyers use their linguistic and discursive choices contrastively to silence, background, and foreground different information.