Duelling contexts: how action misalignment leads to impoliteness in a courtroom

Abstract This paper investigates linguistic and non-linguistic markers of negative evaluations of situated behaviours, termed impoliteness (Culpeper, Jonathan. 2011. Impoliteness: Using language to cause offence. In Drew Paul, Marjorie H. Goodwin, John J. Gumpertz & Deborah Schiffrin (eds.), Studies in interactional linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). The paper takes an interactional pragmatic approach to a fixed institutional setting (a courtroom) to investigate how (not why) a series of reprimands and sanctions unfolded. It shows that the key participants, the judge and the defendant, orient to separate interactional cues from their unshared overhearing audiences (their unshared contexts), whilst orienting to each other’s institutional interaction turns (their shared context). This paper suggests that their contexts create competing architectures of intersubjectivity, termed duelling contexts, because the participants are not co-locative (in separate rooms connected through closed circuit TV).