Some Pragmatic Points of Description of Conducive Questioning in Courtroom Interrogation

Abstract

Courtroom examination holds out much of the drama that characterises the adversarial justice system. In such communicative encounters, attorneys or counsel has the singular task of asking various questions related to the fact about a legal case; witnesses, on the other hand, are institutionally compelled to provide answers to the questions. One of the means by which counsel control the responses of witnesses and get desired answers is what is tagged ‘conducive questioning’. This paper investigates how counsel use conducive questioning to serve predetermined discourse goals. It is argued here that conducive questions lend themselves to pragmatic interpretation with due consideration to the context of use. The data for this study is drawn from two legal matters. The first is a civil suit involving an employee who sued his employer, a big brand in Nigeria’s telecommunication industry, and the second is an electoral dispute taken from the 2011 Governorship Election Petition Tribunal in Adamawa State, north-east Nigeria. A pragma-discursive approach is deployed in the analysis of the data. The findings reveal that conducive questioning in the cases under review is achieved not just through the structural pattern of questions but by the recursive process of pragmatic repetition, and such linguistic elements as negation as well as discourse markers especially where confirmatory questions are involved.