Abstract
The chapter looks at two central pragmatic tools - speech act theory and the cooperative principle - and applies them to legal discourse. Speech act theory is applied mainly to spoken discourse especially in relation to the question-answer adjacency pair. Grice's cooperative principle is discussed principally in the context of legislative acts, in regard to the question whether the cooperative principle may be relevant in this specific case of legal texts. The cooperative principle is then extended to discuss silence in police and in counsel questioning, a discussion that also involves perlocutionary effect.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | Research Handbook on Jurilinguistics |
| Publisher | Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd. |
| Pages | 70-87 |
| Number of pages | 18 |
| ISBN (Electronic) | 9781802207248 |
| ISBN (Print) | 9781802207231 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - 13 Oct 2023 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© The Editors and Contributors Severally 2023.
Keywords
- Adjacency pairs
- Cooperative principle
- Implicatures
- Silence
- Speech acts
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- General Social Sciences