Semiotica (v.2008-171)
by Greg Matoesian
Abstract:
In this article, I draw on Robert Merton's notion of role set theory and his corollary concept of sociological ambivalence as the background for examining a discursive conflict between prosecuting attorney and expert witness in a criminal trial. I hope to demonstrate how the participants display an orientation to ambivalent norms and counternorms in the situated details of interactional and embodied practices. Although these practices certainly do not yield a factual order in the orthodox Durkheimian sense, they do perform a multimodal integration of verbal and bodily conduct in the sociocultural order as participants strive to articulate disturbances in the projected role set — as conflict in the discursive order is superimposed onto represented order. More specifically, rather than attack the expert's physiological theory, the prosecuting attorney attempts to impeach credibility on the grounds that he is an ‘academic’ rather than private physician. I examine not only how the prosecutor attacks the expert along the fault lines of this represented conflict but also how both participants contextualize legal identities and ground epistemological claims in the verbal and visual particulars of legal interaction.
This one is from our "pardon me?" Dept. I've looked at this article for a while now and I'm still having a hard time understanding what it's trying to analyze. Even the title is completely opaque to me. My latest theory is this: Some guy wrote a theory about how we use emotions in a linguistic domain. In this article, the author uses that theory to analyze the discourse of two participants in a trial: An expert witness and the prosecuting attorney. I assume that, eventually, the author untangles this chess game between these two characters and informs us of how such people interact linguistically.
It goes without saying that I am not this author's intended audience. But if I'm not, then who is? Someone steeped in post modern discourse analytic theory. Someone who understands
- what sociologcial ambivalence is
- what ambivalent norms are
- what the difference between norms and counternorms is
- what interactional and embodied practices are
- who durkhaim is and what his orthodox sense is
and so on.
And then what happens? Such a target audience will read this work and apply it to their own work which will be just as opaque to me.
Now let's assume that I'm trying to develop a theory of 'jargon' in some lexical semantics framework which requires an analysis of different registers or other similar social factors, like power struggles between an expert witness and someone challenging his expertise. Maybe there's some interesting insight here that might make it worth my while to learn the lingo and plow through the article. But if I can't even understand what the abstract is saying I'll never even know whether the article should be of any interest to me.
Even worse, if this article has something enlightening to say about how the court of law should be run, how expert witnesses should be treated or talked to in a trial, who's going to apply this author's insights in a way that might actually improve things in the real world?
All academic disciplines share this pitfall: That the work being produced is incomprehensible to anyone but the small group of followers of the particular theoretical constructs. But at the very least, an abstract should, if only in part, be written in a way that a college educated person coming from any of the main field can get the gist. (If not linguistics, someone with a B. degree in sociology or political science should be able to understand the abstract above. I've sent it off to two friends in each of those fields, they were both unable to help me decipher it). In this way, such a person could choose to put the work into reading the whole paper, thus benefiting a larger slice of the world.
Soon we'll see ways in which theoretical linguists fail in this regard.
