Interpreting strategic recontextualization cues in the courtroom: Corpus-based insights into the pragmatic force of non-restrictive relative clauses

In recent decades, studies of the pragmatics of institutional interaction have enhanced our awareness of the ongoingly negotiated nature of context. In this paper, key concepts of the contextualization paradigm, adopted from socio-pragmatics, are outlined and subsequently discussed in the context of courtroom interpreting. Of particular interest here is the fact that interpreters are ethically constrained not to alter the pragmatics of the ongoing interaction, which ultimately presupposes their capacity to identify the contextualization cues with which different participants realign themselves as required. The paper focuses on the notion of ‘strategic’ or ‘covert recontextualization cues’, as illustrated by lawyers’ use of non-restrictive relative clauses. Data from two different corpora provide some evidence of the use of these structures as pragmatically consequential devices, thus challenging the commonly held assumption that non-restrictive relative clauses are only used to ‘add information’. I argue that the evaluative role of such covert cues enables lawyers to step out of the interrogator/interrogated frame in order to secure certain alignments on the part of the defendant or witness; the success or failure of this strategy depends on the interpreter recognizing the pragmatic force of these cues and rendering it accurately into the target language.