Permeable landscapes and multiaccentual discourses – the Protective Order Interview

settings, dialogistic exchanges, CDA, Appraisal, CAT. In the multiethnic landscape of socio-legal care in the USA, the protective order application interview (POI) can be defined as a mediatory genre. POI is what victim-survivors of domestic violence have to pass through when asking for assistance: in institutional contexts professional interviewers evaluate the help-seeking lay interviewees’ credibility and identities – i.e., facethreatening speech events based on power asymmetries between interactants. This paper will report the results of the analysis of battered Latina women’s narratives produced in the course of such interviews. The organizational/ institutional sites where POI take place were also considered, since the focus of the present study is on ‘situated’ meanings – ‘the meanings made in such sites and through such texts, involving all participants’ (Candlin 2009). In those hybrid and permeable settings, the paralegal professionals act in the twofold role of both advocates for the victims and legal gate-keepers, thus shifting from complementary to non-reciprocal status relationship with the applicants. In the sequences of heteroglossic and multiaccentual exchanges that take place during POI, the interviewers’ declared advocacy alternates with the need for legal sustainability of the cases, and, on the other hand, the applicants’ need for protections from violent mates co-exist with the c/overt needs for economic and affective support. A broad CDA perspective was adopted for the analysis, with a major focus within the Appraisal of the emotion-tinged language used in those contexts. The marked attitudinal positioning of all participants that emerged from the study was interpreted both in terms of Communication Accommodation Theory (Giles 1987, 2001; Gnisci & Bakeman 2007) and in the light of the new insights into the category of Affect prospected in Bednarek’s works (2008, 2010). Interacting frameworks were utilized to achieve a deeper understanding of the issues at stake in POI dialogistic exchanges, both in SFL discourseanalytical and in socio-legal perspective/s. REFERENCES: Bednarek, M. (2008) Emotion Talk across Corpora. Houndmills/New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Bednarek, M. (2010) ‘Corpus linguistics and systemic functional linguistics: Interpersonal meaning, identity and bonding in popular culture.’ In M. Bednarek & J. R. Martin (eds) New Discourse on Language: Functional Perspectives on Multimodality, Identity, and Affiliation. London/New York: Continuum, p. 237-266. Candlin, C.N. (2009) ‘Introduction.’ In Bhatia, V. K, Cheng, W., Du-Babcock, B. & Lung, J. (eds.) Language for Professional Communication: Research, Practice & Training. The Hong Kong Polytechnic University/Asia-Pacific LSP and Professional Communication Association: Hong Kong SAR China. Giles, H., Mulac, A., Bradac, J. J., & Johnson, P. (1987) ‘Speech accommodation theory: The next decade and beyond.’ In M.McLaughlin (ed.) Communication yearbook. Newbury Park, CA: Sage, p. 13-48. Gnisci, A., & Bakeman, R. (2007) ‘Sequential accommodation of turn taking and turn length: A study of courtroom interaction.’ Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 26, p. 134- 259. Shepard, C.A., Giles, H. & Le Poire, B. (2001) ‘Communication Accommodation Theory.’ In W.P. Robinson & H. Giles (eds.) The New Handbook of Language and Social psychology. New York: Wiley, p. 33-56.