Speech, Text, and Technology in Testimony

OUP-FIRST UNCORRECTED PROOF, February 18, 2015

Section III

Speech, Text, and Technology in Testimony The three chapters that make up this section examine how the moment-tomoment enactment of testimony in legal hearings uses intertextual and multimedia resources to link itself in time and space to actions by non-present parties. The first two chapters in this section focus on the way that verbally and textually reported speech is used in trials in Italy and in the United States, and the third chapter examines a novel use of a remote videoconference link in a French court to present testimony by non-present witnesses. All three chapters show how the communication technology through which testimony is generated and coordinated—through the interactional machinery of interrogation, through verbal and literary reports, or through a video link—has consequences for the sequential and logical organization of testimony. In Chapter 6, Renata Galatolo, with a fine grained analysis based on conversation analytic methodology, demonstrates how “direct reported speech” (DRS) is introduced and used by witnesses in a criminal trial. She traces the career of particular instances of quoted speech through different phases of a notable murder trial in Italy, and shows how witnesses for both parties endeavor to sustain and contest the evidential status of “the same discursive event” through the iteration of the “same” quotation. Galatolo analyzes the main differences between professionals’ and the witnesses’ use of DRS during the trial and, starting from Philips’ analysis of professionals’ use of DRS in legal setting, she shows that witnesses also tend to use this discursive device in a stable and consistent manner, thus demonstrating that they are oriented to the relevance of its evidentiary function. In Chapter 7, Michael Lynch also examines the career of specific quotations, in this case in the testimony of an expert witness for the defense in a highly publicized civil trial in the United States. He examines how the attorneys for the plaintiff interrogate an adversary witness by quoting the witness’s own statements back to him. The interrogators draw these quotations from prior rounds of testimony in the same case, and also from a series of

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texts written by the witness over a several-year period. The interrogators then use these quotations to successfully extract and reframe concessions from the witness that apparently support their own side’s arguments in the adversarial dispute. The analysis shows how law at work involves an intricate reading and rereading of written texts within a series of interactional exchanges between interrogators and witnesses. In Chapter 8, Christian Licoppe and Laurence Dumoulin examine court hearings in which one or more of the witnesses testifies through a video link to a remote site. Their study uses conversation analysis to compare the temporal and sequential organization of the video-linked testimony with the organization of testimony when witnesses are present in the courtroom along with other parties in the hearing. Licoppe and Dumoulin observe that, for the most part, participants treat the video link as a transparent way to bring testimony into the courtroom, but their study reveals distinctive, and occasionally problematic, features of the availability and co-presence of the remote witness.


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6

Reporting Talk When Testifying Intertextuality, Consistency, and Transformation in Witnesses’ Use of Direct Reported Speech

Renata Galatolo

Introduction Reported speech can be defined as the presence, in an enunciation by one speaker, of another enunciation attributed to a different speaker or to the same speaker in another situation. Reported speech is traditionally classified in terms of the categories of direct reported speech (DRS), indirect reported speech (IRS) and free indirect reported speech (FIRS) (Coulmas 1986): DRS The defendant declared: “I am innocent.” IRS The defendant declared that he was innocent. FIRS The defendant was questioned. He was innocent.

Distinguishing between the different forms of reported speech is, however, much more complex, and hybrid forms of reported speech are frequent (Clark & Gerrig 1990; Tannen 1989).1 Direct reported speech, or quotation, can be defined as the speech that “evokes the original speech situation and conveys or claims to convey the exact words of the original speaker in direct discourse” (Coulmas 1986, 2). Even though the matter of the authenticity of DRS (Holt & Clift 2007) has always been one of the main themes, many scholars (Volosinov 1971; Sternberg 1982; Dubois 1989; Clark & Gerrig 1990; Mayes 1990) agree that DRS is not a literal transposition of what was actually said at a different time and/or in a different situation. In the first place, the discourse attributed to the original speaker, reported in a different context, is subjected, through necessity, to an operation of re-contextualization. As it is not possible for the reporting speaker to reproduce the quoted discourse in its entirety, the original speaker’s words are subject to an operation of selection and are reported only partially (Clark & Gerrig 1990). Finally, studies on human memory have 139


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demonstrated that people are not usually able to reproduce an enunciation word for word, even after a few seconds (Lehrer 1989). Tannen (1989) suggests that the expression creation of voices can be used to highlight the operation of invention presupposed by all reproductions of past discursive events, as an alternative to the expression DRS, while the term active voicing, proposed by Hutchby and Wooffitt (1998), underlines the dramatic nature of this form. Recent studies, based on the consideration that DRS is not a literal reproduction of previous speech but rather an action carried out upon the discourse, an enunciation carried out upon the enunciation (Bakhtin 1981), have focused on its interactional functions. DRS serves an important emotional function (Besnier 1990, 1992; Chafe 1982), which is connected to the opportunity that the form provides for directly witnessing the performance of past discourse. It also serves to underline the most important parts of a narrative by focusing the interlocutors’ attention on quotations. Studies of oral narrative have shown that DRS is often used in correspondence to the climax point of a narrative (Bauman 1986; Li 1986). The use of DRS in dramatizing the central elements of complaint sequences and amusing stories has also been identified (Holt 1996, 2000). In each of these cases, the use of DRS seems to be a signal of the more important elements of the activity in course. In trial interaction, direct reported speech is an important phenomenon because of its strong link with the discursive construction of evidence (Philips 1986; Galatolo 2007). The evidential function of direct reported speech, which has been demonstrated also in interactions between mediums and sitters in séances (Wooffitt 1992, 2001) and in ordinary conversation (Holt 1996), is based on the (lay) assumption that it is the more accurate form of discourse reproduction (Mayes 1990) and, consequently, that it legitimates its interpretation as a form conveying the exact words of the original speaker. The effect of representing past discursive events is construed by introducing DRS, or quotation, with a verb such as say or tell, often signaling it by changes in prosody, and maintaining the deictic center of the reported speaker. All these features contribute to creating the effect of disjunction between the reporting and the reported talk and, consequently, the impression of directly representing the original speech event. By exploiting the claim to represent exact words, that is, the claim to represent reality objectively, DRS can be a strong device for constructing the authenticity of subjective reconstructions of facts, which is a crucial matter for lay witnesses in court (Galatolo 2007; Galatolo & Mizzau 2005). In this chapter, building on my previous analysis of DRS in court (Galatolo 2007), I analyze examples of consistency, among different witnesses, in the use of DRS. The analysis shows how the apparently same quotations, depending on their sequential positioning and on very small variations, can function as evidence of very different versions of facts. Despite these different


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effects in terms of the reconstruction of the facts, the strong consistency among different witnesses in choosing to represent the same discursive events using the same discursive device, that is, direct reported speech, proves that witnesses share the discursive competence that allows them to recognize and to agree about the important elements of the story and about the usefulness of representing them with DRS.

Direct Reported Speech in Court It is possible to distinguish two main uses of DRS in court, mostly depending on who uses it: the professionals (prosecutors or defense attorneys) or the witnesses. The professionals’ use of DRS mainly corresponds to quotations, during examinations and cross-examinations, of the witnesses’ previous statements. In these cases, the interrogators can be engaged in maintaining a quotation, throughout the trial, for its being treated as a proof itself (Philips 1986), or for undermining a witnesses’ credibility by comparing the witnesses’ current version of facts to the previous ones as they have been fixed in police reports or in the trial’s records. In the Italian Procedural Code, this particular legal practice of comparing what the same person, the witness or the defendant, said on different occasions for demonstrating his or her inconsistency is named “objection” (contestazione in Italian). The Italian Procedural Code prescribes that, during the interrogation, the objection must be announced by a special statement “and now I contest” or “and now I raise an objection,” followed by the reading of the report. The objection is usually preceded by a line of questioning (Drew 1979) aimed at obtaining a specific response (it is rarely a single and isolated question), and is followed by the quotation of the previous version to show the inconsistency to the jury: Example 1 Each numbered line contains Italian original, followed by English translation in italics (for transcription conventions, see Appendix)2 Valenza trial Cross-examination of the defendant PM: Prosecutor V: Defendant 1. PM: mi rispond’ a questa domanda (0.5) le chiesero (0.3) aiuto (0.3) answer this question for me (0.5) did they ask you (0.3) for help (0.3) 2. per dare una lezione a questo Enzo che aveva=°aveva° fatto questa giving a lesson to this Enzo who had had done this 3. violenza alla sorella? violent act 3 to the sister?


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4. V: >praticamente loro volevano accertare < se era vero >o non era vero basically they wanted to find out for sure if it was or was not true 5. che la sorella aveva subito sta storia< e:: forse that the sister had been subject to this fact and maybe 6. si stavano interessando cioè non mi dissero they were interesting themselves that is they didn’t say anything 7. direttamente e:: [(abbiamo) to me directly (we have) 8. PM: [ quindi non le chiesero aiuto? so they did not ask you for help? 9. V: cioè mi dissero e es- cioè cosa ne pensavo? that is they said to me that is what I thought of it 10. eh gli ho detto che praticamente era del tutto da vedere cioè eh I told them that basically everything would have to be seen that is 11. non è una questione che si puo’: it isn’t a question you can 12. PM: le chiesero aiuto did they ask you for help 13. (0.6) 14. V: n[on non they didn’t they didn’t 15. PM: [per dare una lezione ad Enzo D’A- ad Enzo? to give a lesson to Enzo D’A- to Enzo? 16. V: no non: non mi dissero: che volevano aiuto praticamente= no they didn’t tell me that they wanted help pretty much 17. PM: =e allora le contesto ((leggendo)) a questo punto and so I contest ((reading)) at this point 18. i fratelli Bonomo rivolgendosi a me dissero che the Bonomo brothers addressing me said that 19. l’autore della violenza aveva bisogno di una lezione the author of the violence needed to get a lesson 20. e che io avrei dovuto aiutarli and that I should have helped them 21. questo l’ha detto lei non l’ho detto io [conferma la di you said this I didn’t say it do you confirm the de 22. V: [lei mi ha detto you told me 23. PM: di asp- la dichiarazione resa adesso? [cioè che to wai- the declaration given now? that is that 24. V: [ lei m You m 25. PM: non le hanno chiesto aiuto? they didn’t ask you for help?


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The objection has a tripartite structure: witness answer (line 16) + formulaic objection (“and so I contest,” line 17) + quotation of the previous version (lines 18–20), as the prosecutor reads the record). This particular use of DRS is characterized by the fact that the quoted speaker, the witness, is always different from the quoting speaker and by the fact that the quoted speaker always participates in the interaction. Another important feature of this type of quotation is its being part of an intertextual link that is explicitly established between speech productions at different stages of the trial. In example 1, when at lines 18–20 the prosecutor reads the previous witness version from the record, the intertextual practice characterizing the objection has the property of being an intermedia process as well (Matoesian 2000). In the objection, professionals often compare written versions of previous oral performances (taken from the trial’s record or from the police report) to the actual oral performance of the witness.4 Witnesses’ use of DRS differs from that of the professionals, as witnesses mainly use it in a narrative context5 for supporting or countering a version of facts. They can report talk of their own or of other people, depending on the scene they evoke. The main feature of the scenes that witnesses represent through DRS is that of being (constructed as) scenes at which the witness was present or in which he or she participated directly.6 The status of lay witness is bound to the person having directly experienced the facts that he or she recounts (Dulong 1998) and, as this status is never acquired once and for all, during the trial witnesses are continually engaged in demonstrating that they have effectively seen, heard, or lived what they recount.7 Previous analyses of DRS in testimonies (Galatolo 2007) have focused on its evidential function, showing that it is strengthened by its location in the second part of the answering turn. In the context of witnesses’ answers, DRS mostly occurs in the narrative expansion8 of the answer: Example 2 Maria Chiara Lipari examination PM: Public prosecutor L: Witness [3: 0.42.06-538] 1. PM: la Alletto e:h le ha avuto modo (.) di dirle (.) did Mrs. Alletto e:h did she have the opportunity (.) to tell you (.) 2. di farle qualche commento su quel giorno cioè su [quella= to make you any comments about that day that is about that= 3. L: [s:ì yes 4. PM: =mattina di venerdì =Friday morning


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5. L: sì yes 6. (1.0) 7. L: disse: (.) .hh che poi si ricorda dottoressa Lipari eh she said (.) .hh you remember don’t you Doctor Lipari eh

In the example, DRS is located in expanded parts of the answers, that is, after the previous answer “yes” (line 5). The second part of the answer contains the reported talk (line 7), and it is offered to the audience as an opportunity to have direct access to the same experience the witness had. DRS gives the audience the opportunity to verify directly what the witness has previously been supporting by her “yes”—that Mrs. Alletto had spoken with her. The content of the expansion and the fact of its adjacency to the first part of the answer, the “yes,” is what orients its interpretation as a development of what immediately precedes, thus as evidence supporting the previous statement. This location of DRS, in second position, highlights and reinforces its evidential function and, even more important, allows the speaker to orient its interpretation following what he or she has previously said. Example 3 Niccolò Lipari examination PM: Public prosecutor NL: Witness [5: 1.02.23 – 70] 1. PM: e:h le sembrò in qualche modo eh: un: tono eh: diverso eh did it seem to you somehow eh: a: different eh: tone 2. dalle altre volte? (.) quello della sera compared to the other times? (.) the tone used on the evening 3. del ventidue mag-maggio? of Ma- May twenty-second? 4. NL: era for:temente interessato a parlare con Chiara= he was really determined to speak with Chiara= 5. =usò quest’impre- quest’espressione io debbo assolutamente parlarle =he used this impre- this expression I absolutely have to speak with her

In the example, in the first part of his answer, the witness describes the attitude of a third person, Professor Romano, saying that “he was really determined to speak with Chiara” (line 4), implying a positive answer (that, yes, it was a different tone compared to the other times) to the question at lines 1–3. Immediately after having described the attitude, the witness expands the answer, representing and supporting the previous description through the activation of that same person’s voice (“he used this expression I absolutely have to speak with her,” line 5). As in example 2, the location of DRS in the


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expansion of the answer reinforces its interpretation as evidence of what has previously been said (in this case, in the first part of the answer). In this example, the first part of the answer contains an evaluation (of the attitude of a third person) that sets up the interpretation of the subsequent part, that is, the expansion, as an instance of what has been defined as being “very determined to speak with Chiara.” In the example, DRS gives the witness the opportunity to support and to objectify his previous evaluation, and this is a powerful device for bypassing the rule which provides that lay witnesses do not express opinions or evaluations but limit their contribution to objectively reporting events.9 From the analysis of our corpus, it emerges that witnesses mostly use this opportunity provided by DRS to objectify opinions and evaluations for accomplishing evaluative actions focused on moral aspects of people’s behavior. This function that DRS can (covertly) accomplish has been defined as a moral function (Galatolo 2007), according to Drew’s definition of moral work as “providing a basis for evaluating the ‘rightness’ or ‘wrongness’ of whatever is being reported” (Drew 1998, 295). The moral function that DRS plays in trial interaction is an important strategic function whose relevance will emerge in the analysis I present in the following part of this chapter.

The Data The data analyzed in this chapter are taken from a murder trial held in Italy in 1998. The victim was a 22-year-old university student, Marta Russo, who was shot as she walked on campus at the university La Sapienza, in Rome. The verdict, which was confirmed in an appeal on November 2002, established that the shot was fired from the window of one of the classrooms (classroom no. 6) of the Department of Philosophy of Law and that it was fired by two researchers from the same department, Scattone and Ferraro. The prosecutor’s case was largely based on testimony from two main witnesses: Maria Chiara Lipari, another researcher in the same department, who claimed to have entered classroom number 6 immediately after the shot was fired, and Gabriella Alletto, the secretary of the department. Despite the credibility they eventually gained during the trial (this is true more for Maria Chiara Lipari’s testimony than for Gabriella Alletto’s), the testimony of both witnesses was problematic for different reasons. During the initial police interrogation, Maria Chiara Lipari did not admit to having been in the classroom or to having seen the defendants retracting the pistol from the window. It was only later that she recalled the circumstances and reconstructed what she saw when entering the classroom. Her later recollection, which was recounted almost two months after the murder, included the presence of Gabriella Alletto in the classroom. Maria Chiara Lipari declared having seen Scattone, Ferraro, Alletto, and Liparota (the


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door-keeper of the department) in the room, near the window, when she entered to make a telephone call to her parents. The fact that her reconstruction placed Gabriella Alletto at the scene forced the latter to explain why she had been reluctant to acknowledge having been in the room and having witnessed the shot. The two women were thus weak witnesses: Maria Chiara Lipari for her extremely delayed recollection and reconstruction of the facts, and Gabriella Alletto for having been reluctant to acknowledge her presence at the scene. During the trial, the director of the Department of Philosophy of Law, Professor Romano, was charged with aiding and abetting the crime because of his attempts to obstruct the investigations by discouraging the members of his department from testifying. His main accuser was Maria Chiara Lipari, supported by her father, Niccolò Lipari, a professor at the same university. Professor Romano was acquitted of the charge. All the excerpts presented in the following pages are taken from the testimonies of Professor Lipari, Professor Romano, and Maria Chiara Lipari, and some of them relate to this charge against Professor Romano.

Consistency in the Use of DRS by Professionals and by Lay Witnesses: Two Different Types of Intertextuality The stable use of direct reported speech in court has been described by Philips in her study of a trial for possession of cocaine in an Arizona criminal court (Philips 1986). In her analysis of the trial, Philips shows that the prosecutors maintain the stability of a quotation they attribute to the defendant over the course of a series of interrogative sequences in which they present the quotation as an indirect admission of culpability.10 The statement, allegedly produced by the defendant when arrested by the police, was recorded as, “I thought you had to have a search warrant in order to seize a man’s property.” The main point of Philips’s analysis concerns the fact that quotes are used by the interrogators to report evidence relevant to elements of the charge and are not used when background information is being provided. She also highlights that during the evidence phase of the trial the quotes display more stability in form than when they are brought into play during other phases of the procedure. But, even more important for the analysis I propose is a third point, which is that, according to Philips’s analysis, professionals, more than lay witnesses or defendants, use DRS to report relevant elements of the charge: “First of all it is the lawyers and the judge who frame the defendant’s and his wife’s speech as quotes. Neither of the witnesses who reports their speech frames it in quotes. Instead they give report of the substance of what was said” (p. 166).


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The analysis I propose shows instead that lay witnesses not only use DRS effectively for reporting elements directly and indirectly linked to the charges, but also that they use it in a rather stable and consistent manner. This holds even among different witnesses and across different testimonies. From my analysis of the whole Marta Russo trial, it emerges that different witnesses often represent the same scenes using DRS, a phenomenon that creates a system of intertextual links between testimonies that differ from those Philips analyzed, that are more similar to the objection (contestazione) I discussed in the first section of this chapter. When using DRS devices, witnesses explicitly use quoted speech to reconstruct discursive events that occurred outside the court. They rarely use DRS to quote from their own prior testimony and they don’t use it to quote from prior testimonies of other witnesses in the trial. This depends on the Italian Procedural Code (Article 149), which prohibits witnesses from assisting in the interrogation of other witnesses, and even when they may know the content of the other testimonies through information their attorneys may have passed to them, they cannot explicitly refer to it when testifying.11 Consequently, a witness should not be able to use DRS to draw intertextual links to the testimony of other witnesses. Such links, and the consistency or inconsistency they (arguably) exhibit, can thus be made only by professional participants and overhearing analysts. Another important analytic point I propose in comparison to Philips’s analysis of court professionals’ consistent use of DRS, concerns the matter of stability. In the analysis I propose, witnesses use DRS in a more variable way than professionals do in Philips’s excerpts, even when they report the “same” quotation at different times in their testimony. This can partly be explained by the professionals’ frequent reliance on written documents, such as police reports and trial records. The quotations I will treat as the “same” quotations for analytical purposes are never exactly the same; there may be small changes in the quoted words, or they may differ because of their location in the sequence of testimony, which can convey slight, or sometimes strong, differences in sense. The unavoidable differences between even apparently the same quotations raises the more general problem of determining and recognizing the “sameness” of a discursive object in the face of such changes. It is important to highlight that this “sameness” is contextually bound and depends on the whole system, in our case the entire trial, within which the discursive object (in this case the quotation) appears, lives, and takes its sense.12 Some authors (Kozin 2008) use the expression career of a legal statement to refer to the life of an identical legal object. This concept allows analysts to follow a statement’s life by attending to its fixed aspects within an extended argumentative structure, while also examining its dynamic use on each concrete and local occasion.


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Consistency in Testimonies of Different Witnesses Appearing for the Same Side in the Trial A comparison of the testimony of two of the witnesses for the prosecution reveals consistency in the choice of discursive events to represent through DRS, and also consistency in the point of view from which they represent those events: Example 4 Examination of Professor Niccolò Lipari13 PM: Public prosecutor NL: Witness 1. PM: e:h did it seem to you somehow eh: a: different eh: tone 2. compared to the other times? (.) the tone used on the evening 3. of Ma- May twenty-second? 4. NL: he was really determined to speak with Chiara= 5. =he used this impre- this expression I absolutely have to speak with her Example 5 Examination of Maria Chiara Lipari PM: Public prosecutor L: Witness 1. L: cioè mio padre appena mise giù il telefono mi disse I mean right after my father hung up the phone he told me 2. m’ha detto (.) pt e:h io sai la devo assolutamente vedere he told me (.) pt eh you know I absolutely have to see her 3. o le devo assolutamente parlare or I absolutely have to speak with her 4. un’espressione del genere an expression like that

When comparing testimony by Professor Lipari (Example 4) and by his daughter (Example 5), it is possible to identify quotations that refer to the same events and/or aspects of events. In Examples 4 and 5, the quotations have different constructions and are located in different sequential contexts. In Example 4, line 5, Professor Lipari reports what Romano said to him when he phoned Lipari at home one evening and asked to speak to Chiara. He produces the quotation in a direct response to the just-prior question by the prosecutor. In Example 5, lines 2–3, Maria Chiara Lipari instead reports Professor Lipari’s words to her immediately upon hanging up the phone. What she is reporting itself takes the form of reported speech attributed to her father. In this case the quotation is embedded in a long narrative that answers a question about the motivation behind her decision to participate in the meeting with Romano and her father. Despite these differences, it is


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striking that the two witnesses at two different stages of the trial produce narrations of the same discursive event by using the same device, in both instances obtaining the effect of depicting Romano’s behavior as suspect. In the context of the trial, expressing urgency with the tone of his voice when saying, “I absolutely have to speak with her” evidently supports the accusation that he tried to convince the members of the department not to testify. Through DRS, both witnesses accomplish moral work: by reporting his words, they implicitly evaluate Romano’s behavior as unusual, worthy of note, memorable, and in the circumstances of the trial, suspect. In Example 4, the moral work is strengthened by the evaluation requested in the question (“Did it seem to you a different tone compared to the other times?”), which is implicitly expressed in the first part of the answer through an (only) apparent description “he was really determined to speak with Chiara,” implying an affirmative answer to the question. Interestingly, while the answer does confirm what the question suggests, it elaborates not with an evaluation of the quality of voice but with a quotation in which the words convey urgency. In many respects, this sequence provides stronger evidence than if the prosecutor had explicitly suggested “urgency” in the question, rather than “difference”—leaving it to the witness to supply what sort of difference it was—and the direct quotation leaves it to the audience to infer urgency for themselves. These features of both the question and answer seem to work to highlight “fact” and to leave “evaluation” to the audience, though they work to set up the audience’s “moral work.”14 I now provide one more example of the same phenomenon, that is, the “same” quotation produced by two different witnesses of the same side in the trial. Example 6 Examination of Professor Lipari PM: Public prosecutor NL: Witness 1. PM: >mi scusi< e::h quando poi lei successivamente >excuse me< eh later when you later 2. la mattina dopo: eh si recò insieme con sua figlia the next morning you went with your daughter 3. a parlare con il professore Romano (.) questa decisione to speak with professor Romano (.) was this decision 4. di anda- di accompagnare- (.) sua figlia to go to accompany (.) your daughter 5. fu presa da >leidi< cosa si parlò (.) can you someway tell us what you spoke about (.) 2. in quell’incontro during that encounter 3. NL: l:’incontro si articolò in questo modo (.) the encounter went like this (.) 4. nella prima parte: (.) del colloquio Romano: e:h ci: hm in the first part (.) of the conversation Romano eh us hm


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5. disse alcune battute .h sullo svolgimento delle indagini made hm a few remarks .h about the course of the investigation 6. .h i:-in tono: h:::m direi:- .hh così sostanzialmente negativo .h using a tone hm I would say .hh basically doubtful 7. sulla loro incidenza= non hanno niente in mano in regard to its effectiveness they have nothing in their hands 8. non ci sono elementi .h e::h nemmeno la traiettoria there are no elements .h eh even the trajectory 9. può essere attendibile perché il movimento isn’t reliable because the movement 10. della testa h e:h della: povera ragazza of .h eh the poor girl’s head 11. può aver inciso in maniera .h determinante e simili may have been a determining factor and so on Example 9 Examination of Maria Chiara Lipari L: Witness 1. L.: per esempio col Dottor Punzi dicevano: perché poi:. for example they told Doctor Punzi because then 2. non troveranno mai: .hh non troveran they will never find .hh they won’t find3. non potranno mai ricostruire::h la traiettoria they’ll never be able to reconstruct the trajectory 4. perché il proiettile si è:: (1.0) pt .h il proiettile because the bullet was (1.0) pt .h the bullet 5. si è frantumato dissero in undici pezzi non so exploded they said into eleven pieces I don’t know

Examples 8 (lines 7–11) and 9 (lines 1–5) contain quotations referring to two different conversations: the first between Romano, Professor Lipari, and his daughter, Maria Chiara, and the second between Romano and Punzi, a member of the department staff. Despite the differences between the two quotations (the quotation in Example 9 is even less complete than that in Example 8), in both testimonies the witnesses report what Romano said about the investigation (in the quotation Romano uses the pronoun “they” to refer to the investigators), highlighting his negative evaluation of the ongoing inquiry. The common element is the mentioning of the impossibility, for the investigators, to reconstruct the trajectory of the bullet because of the movement of the girl’s head (Example 8, lines 8–10) and the fragmentation of the bullet (Example 9, lines 4–5). In Example 8, the detail relative to the girl’s injury (“the movement of the poor girl’s head”) is packaged within a list of items: “they have nothing in their hands” (line 7), “there are no elements,”


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(line 8) and “even the trajectory isn’t reliable” (lines 8–9). Due to its paratactic organization, the list treats all its items as members of the same category, which in this case is the category of “weak elements of the ongoing investigation.”15 Professor Lipari quotes Professor Romano’s words while depicting the prosecution’s weakness in order to reassure Maria Chiara and to discourage her from testifying. Hence, it is the instrumental use of such a dramatic detail (instrumental because in the service of the questionable Romano’s behavior) that makes the quotation of that item of the list particularly suited to depict Romano as a cynical man. The dramatic character of that detail is displayed by Professor Lipari by the hesitation that precedes and accompanies the item’s production at lines 8 and 10. In Example 9, reporting Romano’s words, Maria Chiara mentions the same element, further developed through the reference to the bullet’s explosion within the girl’s head: “the bullet exploded into eleven pieces” (lines 4 and 5). Even in this case, the witness displays the difficulty of mentioning that element through a hesitation, the prolongation of the word “was,” followed by a pause of 1 second, the “pt” sound and the in-breath (.h), at line 4. Maria Chiara’s emotional involvement in speaking about the girl’s injury is also outlined by her distancing herself from what she has just said through the “I don’t know” that immediately follows “the bullet exploded into eleven pieces,” at line 5. To resume, both witnesses mention the same element, the girl’s injury, while verbatim reporting what Professor Romano said to two different interlocutors, in both cases while depicting the inefficacy of the investigation. Hence, it’s through the specific contextualization of that (dramatic) item within Romano’s questionable behavior, his personal campaign against the investigation, that the mentioning of the girl’s injury has the effect of strengthening the allusion to Romano’s immorality. In these examples the quotations are not literally the same, but it is interesting to note that in all cases the two speakers use DRS to relate the same information; beyond the variations regarding the uttered words or the choice of the person uttering them, we easily recognize the same element of the story passing from one speaker (witness) to the other and from one co-text to the other. As DRS is particularly effective in representing and highlighting past scenes, and in introducing subjective evaluation as matters of fact, we can assume that the scenes that witnesses seem to choose to represent by DRS as matters of fact are aspects that they consider important and/or problematic in relationship to the version of facts they support, and that they choose to strengthen those problematic aspects by supporting them through DRS.16 The consistency in the quotations of different prosecution witnesses seems to point to the conclusion that the discursive events, or aspects of discursive events, represented by DRS correspond to elements of the prosecution’s


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version of the facts that both witnesses recognize as being important. As in other contexts, the use of DRS seems to indicate central elements of the activity in which the participants are involved.

Consistency in the Testimonies of Witnesses Representing Opposing Sides in the Trial The same phenomenon of consistency in the use of DRS for representing past discursive events can be found in testimony by witnesses representing opposing sides in the trial. Prosecution and defense witnesses seem to share the same understanding that a particular event is central for the case. However, with their representations of the “same” event using DRS, they produce different versions of this same event. Each representation, even when it apparently uses the same words, obtains a different effect in support of different versions of what seems to be the same fact. Example 10 Cross-examination of Professor Romano PM: Public prosecutor Pres: President (presiding judge) Rom: Witness 1. PM: la Lipari le dice guardi io ho visto Liparota e Alletto Ms. Lipari says to you look I saw Liparota and Alletto 2. all’interno di quella stanza e lei che con Alletto in that room and you who with Alletto 3. mi pare abbia un ottimo rapporto non ha la curiosità seems to me are on excellent terms aren’t you curious 4. che tutti avremmo in particolar modo lei forse perché like we all would be you especially perhaps because 5. deve anche rispondere di quello che succede all’interno dell’istituto you are also responsible for what goes on inside the institute 6. di chiedere all’ Alletto se c’era veramente se c’era anche to ask Alletto if she was really there if also there was [7 righe omesse] 7. Rom: >Presidente< la Lipari nel: colloquio avvenuto President Mrs. Lipari in the conversation which took place 8. alla presenza del padre e nella telefonata in the presence of her father and in the telephone call 9. che è integralmente trascritta (.) mi dice which is integrally transcribed she tells me 10. esclusivamente nel colloquio a tre only in the three-party conversation


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11. di aver avuto delle immagini subliminali [me lo ripete that she’d had subliminal images she repeats it 12. Pres: [sì ma yes but 13. Rom: tante [volte many times 14. Pres: [si ma le ha fatto [il nome yes but did she mention the name 15. Rom: [e mi dice poi a un certo punto and she says then at a certain point 16. piangendo e ansando ma chi sa chi può essere (.) crying and breathless but who knows who it was (.) 17. .h e mi fa a un certo punto questo nome dell’ Alletto .h and she mentioned at a certain point the name of Mrs. Alletto 18. Pres: [ecco there 19. Rom: [>e subito dopo dice< ma no è una buona madre di famiglia (.) and immediately after she says but no she is a good mother of a family (.) 20. e lo lascia morire lì così and she lets it drop there in this way Example 11 Examination of Professor Romano DL: Defense lawyer Pres: President ok Rom: Witness 1. DL: passiamo al colloquio del ventitré maggio (.) let’s move on to the conversation of May the twenty-third (.) 2. se lei per favore facendo >proprio< focalizzando l’attenzione could you please make or rather focusing your attention 3. sulle parole della Lipari riesce a dire in questa sede on the words of Mrs. Lipari could you tell to the Court 4. tutto quello che le è stato detto dalla Lipari circa eh:: everything Mrs. Lipari told you about eh 5. le indagini e: quanto=aveva visto the investigations and what she had seen 6. Pres: e quanto aveva detto agli inquiren[ti and what she said to the investigators 7. DL: [agli inqui[renti to the investigators 8. Rom: [si il quello yes the what


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9. che che ricordo è questo la Lipari hm mi dice eh: I remember is this Mrs. Lipari hm told me eh 10. io ho una mia- questo è il concetto I have my- this is the concept 11. ho una mia vita razionale (.) ma accanto alla vita razionale I have a rational life (.) but aside from my rational life 12. ho una mia vita (.) affettiva emozionale emotiva I have my affective emotional emotive life 13. .h e in questa: ha ritrovato: delle immagini che .h in which she found certain images that 14. lei diceva essere dei ricordi subliminali she told me were subliminal recollections 15. non hanno nessun rilievo penale with no criminal importance whatsoever 16. a un certo punto come ho già detto prima at a certain point as I said before 17. >dà un nome a una di queste immagini dice< she gives a name to one of those images she says 18. forse può essere l’Alletto e immediatamente dice maybe it was Mrs. Alletto but then she immediately says 19. ma no è una buona madre di famiglia but no she is a good mother of a family Example 12 Cross-examination of Professor Lipari DL: Defense lawyer NL: Witness 1. DL: e lei (.) r:icorda oggi che (.) ci fu anche and today do you re:member that (.) there was also 2. un accenno alla Alletto vero a mention of Mrs. Alletto is that true 3. NL: sì da parte di Chiara Chiara disse: (.) yes by Chiara Chiara said (.) 4. ma io il nome dell’Alletto l’ho fatto: but I mentioned the name of Mrs. Alletto 5. .h e::h insomma lo disse con: accorame:nto: .h eh in short she was sorry to say it 6. .h è una madre di famiglia eccetera .h she is a mother of a family and so on 7. hm comunque l’ho fatto agli investigatori questo nome hm in any case I mentioned her name to the investigators


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Example 13 Cross-examination of Professor Lipari DL: Defense lawyer NL: Witness 1. NL: comunque: se queste oggi qui si tratta di anyway if these today the issue here is to 2. ricostruire il contenuto oggetti:vo dell’incontro reconstruct the objective content of the encounter 3. a tre (.) in quel (consen-) between us three (.) during that (consen-) 4. in quell’incontro a tre sicuramen:te in that encounter between the three of us definitely 5. mia figlia fece riferimento (.) alla Alletto my daughter made reference to Mrs. Alletto 6. DL: va ben[e that’s right 7. NL: [a:nzi: e:h con una lieve: (.)incrinatura or rather e:h with a little cracked 8. nella voce perché diceva: voice because she said 9. è perso:na:.h eh che conosco be:ne: I know her very well 10. a me ca:ra madre di figli she’s someone I care about a mother of children

In these examples, taken from Professor Romano’s and Professor Lipari’s examination and cross-examination, all the quotations refer to the same speech event, that is, to the conversation between Romano, Maria Chiara Lipari, and Professor Lipari that took place on Friday the 23rd at the university, but the two witnesses highlight different aspects of Maria Chiara’s contribution to that conversation. Both Professor Lipari and Romano are examined and cross-examined about what Chiara said during that conversation, with particular attention given to the issue of whether or not she mentioned having told the investigators that she had seen Mrs. Alletto in room number 6. Each witness reports the same event twice17 and, in both testimonies, the small variations between the first and the second reports by each witness do not seem to change significantly what either witness reports. The same does not hold true, however, when Professor Romano’s testimony is compared to that of Professor Lipari. The discursive events they represent in fact only seem the same. In his representation, Professor Romano highlights Chiara’s uncertainty in involving Mrs. Alletto in the investigation. In both instances in Examples 10 and 11, Romano introduces uncertainty by mentioning that Chiara


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herself presented her recollections as consisting of “subliminal images” (Example 10, line 11, and Example 11, line 14). He further accentuates the uncertainty in the second part with the quotation “but no she is a good mother of a family” (Example 11, line 19). Here, the use of the conjunction “but no” suggests that the next phrase is in opposition, for Chiara herself, with what stated previously, which is that Mrs. Alletto was in the room. Romano represents the second part of the quotation as if Chiara Lipari considers the fact that she saw Mrs. Alletto in room number 6 as being dissonant with Mrs. Alletto being “a good mother of a family.” The disjunction thus supports and reinforces Romano’s representation of Chiara’s recollection as dubious and uncertain. Conversely, Professor Lipari’s representation of the event doesn’t mention Chiara’s uncertainty at all, nor does he say anything about her “subliminal images.” He simply states that she said she mentioned Mrs. Alletto to the investigators. The second part of the quotation is almost the same as Romano’s version, “I know her very well she’s someone I care about a mother of children” (Example 13, lines 9–10). However, Lipari uses the quotation to represent his daughter’s interior conflict over having identified Mrs. Alletto to the investigators. The same reported quotation by one witness (Romano) becomes evidence supporting a version of the story that depicts Chiara as having been uncertain that it was actually Mrs. Alletto in the room, whereas for the other witness (Professor Lipari), it becomes evidence that supports a version of the story in which Chiara’s main feelings were those of remorse or conflict over having possibly implicated Mrs. Alletto in the murder. The moral work accomplished by these two versions clearly moves in the opposite direction. Romano represents Maria Chiara Lipari as a person whose image of Mrs. Alletto at the scene of the crime was perhaps imaginary (“subliminal”) and unsure. The consequent moral evaluation could be of irresponsibility, thoughtlessness, or even insanity. Professor Lipari represents Chiara as suffering and distressed over the deep sense of responsibility for implicating Mrs. Alletto in the trial. These two opposite representations are perfectly consistent with the opposing versions in the trial of Chiara’s status as a witness. The defense maintained that Chiara was an unreliable witness whose recollections crystallized too late to be credible and were most likely prompted by the prosecutor, while the prosecution maintained that Chiara testified late because her profound sense of responsibility led her to wait until she was sure of her recollections. The scenes that both witnesses represent through DRS, then, contain important elements for the formulation of opposing moral judgments of Maria Chiara Lipari’s status as a witness, which is a very important and delicate element in the trial.


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Conclusion The analysis of the use of DRS during different moments of different testimony within the same trial has shown that there is strong consistency in the discursive episodes that different witnesses chose to represent using this device. As the mainly narrative functions of DRS are those of highlighting and supporting important or problematic elements of the story, this consistency indirectly proves that witnesses share evaluations about important elements in the versions of facts they support or dispute, and choose to represent them with DRS. By following the career of distinct quotations across different stages of the trial, this chapter has described an emerging intertextual structure in which testimonies seem to sustain or counter previous representations of the same discursive event. The stability of these elements across different testimonies, besides confirming their evidential strength functions to create and maintain this same strength, transforming them into important elements in the case. From the comparison of the “same” quotations by different witnesses, it emerges that even small variations in lexical choice or in constructing the context of reported talk can modify the sense of the apparently same quotation so that it supports either side in the opposing versions of facts. Starting from Philips’s study (1986), which demonstrated consistency in the professionals’ use of DRS within the same trial, in contrast to the witnesses’ and defendants’ orientations to report the gist of what was said, the analysis in this chapter has shown that even non-professionals systematically use DRS as a device for providing evidence about elements that can be relevant for the case, demonstrating that they are aware of the evidential strength of DRS and able to exploit it in the context of interrogations.

Notes I am indebted to Paul Drew for his valuable suggestions and comments on a previous version of this paper and to Michael Lynch for his careful review of this chapter. 1. More recent studies of DRS in naturally occurring interaction (Holt 2007; Goodwin 2007) have also demonstrated that Goffman’s (1979) analysis of speakers’ roles and of participation framework is inadequate to describe forms of collaborative shifts of footing and voice activation. 2. The transcript notation is based on Gail Jefferson’s notation, as presented in Atkinson and Heritage (1984). See Appendix. 3. With “violent act,” we translate the Italian “violenza,” which refers to a violent sexual act, rape. 4. Consequently, all these intertextual phenomena are linked to the phenomenon of the use of written texts in interaction. On the use of written texts in legal settings, see the


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special issue of Research on Language and Social Interaction, edited by Martha Komter (2006). An analysis of the criminal hearings as intertextually structured communicative events is also proposed in D’hondt (2009). 5. Clift (2007) distinguishes between narrative and non-narrative DRS. The nonnarrative reported speech corresponds to reported speech in which “interactional motivations [. . .] cannot be understood by reference to a larger interactional unit [of] such story-telling” (Clift 2007, 121). 6. The important dramatic and persuasive function of DRS in witnesses’ testimonies is also highlighted in Matoesian (2001). 7. The necessity of proving what they say is typical of speakers who are engaged in defensive activities, that is, in narrative activities that risk being challenged by the interlocutors because they are suspected of lacking credibility. This is also the case for stories recounted in the medium-sitter interaction (Wooffitt 1992, 2001). For this special type of story, Sacks (1992) uses the category of defensively designed stories. 8. Narrative expansions are expansions that go beyond the frame of the question. I use this expression for distinguishing this type of expansion from the expansion of the minimal answer, such as “yes they did” or “yes they told me,” which remain within the framework of the question. On expansions in trial interaction, see also Galatolo and Drew (2006). 9. On “evidentiary constraints” and their functioning in court, see Philips (1992). 10. Philips’s analysis refers to a phenomenon which is similar to the objection I have illustrated in the first section of this chapter. The professionals quote the defendant activating the words he would have said at the moment of his arrest. 11. Consistency could also be explained, at least as far as the choice of the events to represent, by the fact that the questions often address the information already introduced in previous testimony, but this is not enough to explain consistency among witnesses in choosing to represent these events by using the same discursive device. 12. For a discussion on the “sameness” of different discursive events and on the relation between testimonies’ truthfulness and literal correspondence (between testimony and the original event), see Neisser (1981); Edwards and Potter (1990) and the discussion of these works in Lynch and Bogen (1996). 13. The Italian version of this excerpt is in Example 3, above. 14. For the analysis of this point, I am indebted to Michael Lynch for his observations. 15. For a more extensive analysis of the moral work accomplished by this item in the context of the list, see Galatolo (2007, 217–218). For the analysis of list construction in interaction, see Jefferson (1990) and Selting (2007). 16. As Pomerantz (1984) observes, ordinarily people use evidence when the state of affairs being evidenced is uncertain or problematic. 17. In the second excerpt (Example 11) Professor Romano explicitly establishes the intertextual link between his current testimony and a previous one (“as I said before,” line 20).

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Speech, Text, and Technology in Testimony Besnier, N. 1992. “Reported Speech and Affect on Nukulaelae Atoll.” In Responsibility and Evidence in Oral Discourse, edited by J. H. Hill, and J. T. Irvine, 161–181. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chafe, Wallace L. 1982. “Integration and Involvement in Speaking, Writing and Oral Literature.” In Spoken and Written Language: Exploring Orality and Literacy, edited by Deborah Tannen, 35–44. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Clark, Herbert H., and R. J. Gerrig. 1990. “Quotations as Demonstrations.” Language 66(4): 764–805. Clift, Rebecca. 2007. “Getting There First: Non-Narrative Reported Speech in Interaction.” In Reporting Talk: Reported Speech in Interaction, edited by Elisabeth Holt and Rebecca Clift, 120–149. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Coulmas, Florian, ed. 1986. Direct and Indirect Speech. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. D’hondt, Sigurd. 2009. “Good Cops, Bad Cops: Intertextuality, Agency, and Structure in Criminal Trial Discourse.” Research on Language and Social Interaction 42(3): 249–275. Drew, Paul. 1979. “The Production of Justifications and Excuses by Witnesses in CrossExamination.” In Order in Court, edited by J. M. Atkinson and P. Drew, 136–187. London: Macmillan. Drew, Paul. 1998. “Complaints about Transgressions and Misconduct.” Research on Language and Social Interaction 31(3–4): 295–325. Dubois, B. L. 1989. “Pseudoquotation in Current English Communication: ‘Hey, she didn’t really say it.’” Language in Society 18: 343–359. Dulong, Renaud. 1998. Le témoin oculaire. Les conditions sociales de l’attestation personnelle. Paris: Editions de l’Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. Edwards, Derek, and Potter, Jonathan. 1990. “Ulrich Neisser’s Memory.” In Discursive Psychology, edited by D. Edwards and J. Potter, 30–53. London: Sage. Galatolo, Renata. 2007. “Active Voicing in Court.” In Reporting Talk: Reported Speech in Interaction, edited by Elisabeth Holt and Rebecca Clift, 195–220. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Galatolo, Renata, and Paul Drew. 2006. “Narrative Expansions as Defensive Practices in Courtroom Testimony.” Text & Talk 26(6): 661–698. Galatolo, Renata, and Marina Mizzau. 2005. “Quoting Dialogues and the Construction of the Narrative Point of View in Legal Testimony: The Role of Prosody and Gestures.” Special issue “Argumentation in Dialogic Interaction,” edited by Marcelo Dascal, Frans Van Eemeren, Eddo Rigotti, Sorin Stati, and Andrea Rocci. Studies in Communication Sciences 4(3) 217–231. Goffman, Erving. 1979. “Footing.” Semiotica 25: 1–29. Goodwin, Charles. 2007. “Interactive Footing.” In Reporting Talk: Reported Speech in Interaction, edited by Elisabeth Holt and Rebecca Clift, 16–46. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Holt, Elisabeth. 1996. “Reporting on Talk: The Use of Direct Reported Speech in Conversation.” Research on Language and Social Interaction 29(3): 219–245. Holt, Elisabeth. 2000. “Reporting and Reacting: Concurrent Responses to Reported Speech.” Research on Language and Social Interaction 33(4): 425–454.


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Speech, Text, and Technology in Testimony Volosinov, V. N. 1971. “Reported Speech.” In Readings in Russian Poetics: Formalist and Structuralist Views, edited by L. Matejka and K. Polorska, 149–175. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Wooffitt, Robin. 1992. Telling Tales of the Unexpected: The Organization of Factual Discourse. Hemel Hempstead, UK: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Wooffitt, Robin. 2001. “Raising the Dead: Reported Speech in Medium-Sitter Interaction.” Discourse Studies 3(3): 351–374.

Appendix: Transcription Conventions This appendix describes the symbols used in the extracts. All of them were conceived by Gail Jefferson. Symbols (.) (0.7) [ = . , ? .hhh hhh. wohrd °word° WORD word (word) >word