"Syntactic Complexity of the Questions Posed in TV-based Legal Drama Series: A Corpus-based Study" | ||
| هرمس | ||
| Article 5, Volume 13, Issue 2 - Serial Number 48, April 2024, Pages 7-44 PDF (835.99 K) | ||
| Document Type: المقالة الأصلية | ||
| DOI: 10.21608/herms.2024.381681 | ||
| Author | ||
| Hla Salah | ||
| New Giza University | ||
| Abstract | ||
| Questioning in the courtroom is considered an important research topic because the question-and-answer format is the only communication form allowed between the prosecutors/defense lawyers and the suspects/witnesses. One of the contributing factors behind the interest in what takes place inside the courtroom is the broadcasting of some of the trials on television such as the Ted Bundy and O.J. Simpson trials. Such trials became the inspiration behind the TV-legal based drama series that focused on the verbal sparring between the lawyer and the witness/suspect in question. This verbal sparring has gathered an audience when TV-shows such as Bull (2016 – 2019) and How to Get Away with Murder (2014 – 2020) were broadcast and became popular. Part of the appeal can be linked to how, through questions, lawyers manage to push the suspect into confessing their crimes. Despite the popularity of the TV-based legal drama series, little research has been done to investigate this field, linguistically. Hence, this study adopted a quantitative/qualitative linguistic approach to compare and contrast the different syntactic complexity scores of the posed questions to the layman witness in the TV-based legal series trials during the direct and cross-examinations stages of the trials. | ||
| Keywords | ||
| forensic linguistics; direct examination stage; cross-examination stage; questions; syntactic complexity | ||
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