Cross-examining lawyers, facework and the adversarial courtroom

This paper proposes a Goffman-inspired framework for capturing lawyers’ facework activities. Goffman's (1967:14) three levels of face threat – intentional, incidental and accidental – differ according to the extent to which the S[peaker] is seen to be engaging in:1.“malicious and spiteful” face damage;2.activities where face damage may be an “unplanned by-product” of an interchange (which S is nevertheless prepared to undertake);3.activities where face damage is completely unintended on S's part, such that S “would have attempted to avoid” such activities had s/he “foreseen” the potentially “offensive consequences”.Current (linguistic) impoliteness models tend to draw on Goffman's intentional level to explain impoliteness in conflictive text-types which include the courtroom (i.e. 1). This paper argues, in contrast, that a cross-examining lawyer's (facework) strategy will fall somewhere between Goffman's intentional and incidental level, in the main (i.e. 1 and 2). A new zone is thus proposed – that of strategic ambivalence – which is situated (so as to allow for movement) between Goffman's (1967) intentional and incidental levels. The three levels, in turn, become a facework aggravation scale/continuum. Intention, here, is used in a pragmatic – specifically, a discursive – sense as opposed to a philosophical or legal sense.

► Article discusses sanctioned use of verbal aggression in Anglo-American courtroom. ► Goffman-inspired facework model developed to account for planned verbal aggression. ► Uses intentional/incidental levels and a transitional strategic ambivalence zone. ► New zone accounts for lawyers’ (necessary) use of indirectness/multifunctionality. ► Article thus touches on issues of facework intentionality.