Speech Comments and Intertextuality: Evidence from Courtroom Discourse

Abstract

Underpinned by the assumption that all texts are heteroglossic and polyphonous (Bakhtin 1981), this study proposes to examine an area that has been neglected in the scholarship of intertextuality. Attending to the opening speech event of American criminal trials, this study identifies the forms and functions of common speech comments and explicates the ways in which these comments provide different contextualization cues about how a statement (and other relevant intertextual aspects) should be processed and understood. The findings reveal five common categories of speech comments, and these comments become instrumental for speech presenters to achieve the communicative goals of persuasion in this setting. These speech comments function to mediate both the propositional content of the opening statement as well as negotiate the interpersonal relationship between the presenter and the audience.