A cognitive and systemic functional approach of the use of personal pronouns in legal discourse: life insurance contracts and court hearings as a case study

Authors

  • Ameni Hlioui Laboratory of Approaches to Discourse, Sfax, Tunisia

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1558/ijsll.41340

Keywords:

Court Hearings, Life Insurance Contracts, Choice, Generic Variation, Participant Roles

Abstract

This thesis aims at studying personal pronouns from two perspectives: Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL henceforth) and Cognitive Linguistics. The experiential metafunction of SFL is used to determine if different speakers assign different participant roles to personal pronouns to serve their different ends. The interpersonal metafunction of SFL is used to check if the use of personal pronouns can reflect the social status of speakers and detect whether they are credible in their speech. As far as Cognitive Linguistics is concerned, this thesis attempts to apply cognitive models like the Attention Model (Langacker, 1987 & 2008) and the Force Dynamics Model (Talmy, 2000) to see if personal pronouns can be used as a tool of exertion of power in discourse. The corpus of this study belongs to a discourse that is an ‘exercise of power and of power over meaning’ (Goodrich, 1987: 2): the legal discourse. This corpus pertains to two genres of legal discourse: Life Insurance Contracts and Court Hearing Transcripts. These genres are chosen because one of the important goals of this thesis is to discover whether the variable of genre affects the distribution of personal pronouns and their participant roles in legal discourse. In order to achieve the aforementioned aims, a variety of quantitative and qualitative tools are employed in the methodology of this thesis. The UAM CorpusTool is used to annotate all the instances of personal pronouns according to their context in the corpus, the participant roles assigned to them and their sources. After annotation, the statistical tools of frequency distribution and the Chi-square test are used to test the hypotheses of this thesis. On the qualitative paradigm, an in-depth study of the use of some personal pronouns using the SFL and Cognitive Linguistics approaches for interpretation is carried out. It has been concluded that the choice of certain personal pronouns and of certain participant roles assigned to them is genre specific. Indeed, the genre of the corpus dictates certain preferences of reference density and of processes and participant roles. These preferences are also dependent on the aims of each genre. It has also been found out that the power dynamics holding between the different participants of each genre and between the different types of participants in court hearings affect the choice of personal pronouns and the participant roles assigned to them. The results have led to the conclusion that this choice is also influenced by the different objectives these different participants seek to achieve in different legal settings.

Author Biography

  • Ameni Hlioui, Laboratory of Approaches to Discourse, Sfax, Tunisia

    Ameni Hlioui is a teacher (assistant) of English Language and Linguistics at the Higher Institute of Languages of Gabes and a member of the Laboratory of Approaches to Discourse in the Faculty of letters and Human Sciences of Sfax, Tunisia. She is also a member of the executive committee of the Systamic Functional Linguistics Association of Tunisia.

    She got a Master’s degree in Applied Linguistics and Discourse Analysis in 2013. She Obtained her PhD entitled “A Cognitive and Systemic Functional Analysis of the Use of Personal pronouns in Legal Discourse: Life Insurance Contracts and Court Hearings as a Case Study” in 2018.

    Her research interests include Language and Linguistics, Legal Discourse, Systemic Functional Linguistics, Semantics, Syntax, Cognitive Linguistics and Media Studies. She has participated in various national and international conferences and study days. 

    Her publications include:

    Hlioui, A. (2018). A Systemic Functional Analysis of the Use of Personal Reference in the Medrano Burglary Court Hearings. In Sellami Baklouti, A. & Fontaine, L. (eds). Perspectives from Systemic Functional Linguistics, 381-401. New York, Routledge.

References

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Published

2020-08-27

Issue

Section

Thesis Abstracts

How to Cite

Hlioui, A. (2020). A cognitive and systemic functional approach of the use of personal pronouns in legal discourse: life insurance contracts and court hearings as a case study. International Journal of Speech, Language and the Law, 27(1), 99-101. https://doi.org/10.1558/ijsll.41340