Reformulation and Conflict in Witness Examination: The Case of Public Inquiries

This paper focuses on the development of witness examination as an argumentative dialogue between legal professionals and lay-people, considering inparticular the case of Public Inquiries in Great Britain. This paper discusses the retention of traces of the adversarial system, typical of Common Law trials, in thistype of inquisitorial proceedings, stressing on how counsels exploit some linguistic features to control both the form and the ideational content of the exchange as wellas the power relationship with the witness. The analysis is carried out on a corpus of 15 days of witness examination transcripts (507,346 words) collected from threedifferent Public Inquiries, namely Bloody Sunday Inquiry (Northern Ireland), Shipman Inquiry (England), and Cullen Inquiry (Scotland), to achieve a widerperspective on Common Law administrative justice. The study is based on a discourse and genre analytic approach for the macro-analysis of Public Inquiries in thecontext of courtroom discourse and of witness examination as a genre that develops within this discourse framework. Subsequently, a micro-analysis of the linguisticfeatures used by counsel in questions to argumentatively shape the content and theform of the exchange is provided. We also take into consideration the role ofmetadiscourse (textual and interpersonal), repetitions and reformulations. Preliminaryresults show that these linguistic features provide valuable evidence for thehypothesis that the adversarial side of the argumentative dialogue between legalprofessionals and lay-people during the witness examination of Public Inquiries isretained.