The Language of Jury Trial: A Corpus-Aided Analysis of Legal-Lay Discourse (Paperback)

Drawing on representative corpora of transcripts from over 100 English criminal jury trials this stimulating new book explores the nature of legal-lay discourse or the language used by legal professionals before lay juries. Careful analyses of genres such as witness examination and the judge s summing-up reveal a strategic tension between a desire to persuade the jury and the need to conform to legal constraints. The book also suggests ways of managing this tension linguistically to help not hinder the jury.