Sequential accommodation in Italian courtroom examinations

The present contribution aims at analyzing the sequential process characterizing the interaction between legal professionals and witnesses during courtroom examinations. The theoretical frame is provided by the Communication Accommodation Theory (CAT) that assumes that interactants use strategic behaviours, mainly based on language and communication, to negotiate social distance between themselves and the others through convergent, divergent and maintenance strategies. One hundred forty eight examinations (82h 19m) were coded for question coerciveness and answer pertinence, and their sequential occurrence was analyzed considering four steps (question-answer-question-answer or answer-question-answer-question). The results showed that coercive questions are more frequent than non coercive ones and, among them, both the Declaration and the Yes-no questions are the most frequently asked, whereas, among answers, Pertinent answers and Elaborations are the most recurrent. Furthermore, the speaker’s turn-taking is mainly affected by his own prior turn (rather than by the interlocutor’s preceding turn) and turns are determined mainly by maintenance (a self-directed strategy) rather than by convergence or divergence (other-directed strategies). However, other-directed strategies are based mainly on convergence: Witnesses accommodated to the lawyers’ questions while the Legal Professionals accommodated to the witnesses’ answers. Both answers and questions resulted to be affected by contingent behaviours in the same way (67%), since answers were influenced by three preceding steps (question-answer-question) and the following questions were influenced by two previous steps (question-answer). Our findings lead to the conclusion that, in courtroom interactions, any communicative act is determined not only by the last linguistic event, but by a longer chain, including previous behaviour exerted by both the lawyer and the witness.