Book Reviews
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- Discourse & Society [ 0957-9265 ] ; 1993-10.
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DOI: 10.1177/0957926593004004005
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URI="journalpublishing.dtd" name="istex:docType"></istex:docType><istex:document><article article-type="review-article" dtd-version="2.3" xml:lang="EN"><front><journal-meta><journal-id journal-id-type="hwp">spdas</journal-id><journal-id journal-id-type="publisher-id">DAS</journal-id><journal-title>Discourse & Society</journal-title><journal-subtitle>An International Journal for the Study of Discourse and Communication in Their Social, Political and Cultural Contexts</journal-subtitle><issn pub-type="ppub">0957-9265</issn><publisher><publisher-name>SAGE Publications</publisher-name><publisher-loc> </publisher-loc></publisher></journal-meta><article-meta><article-id pub-id-type="doi">10.1177/0957926593004004005</article-id><article-id pub-id-type="publisher-id">10.1177_0957926593004004005</article-id><article-categories><subj-group subj-group-type="heading"><subject>Articles</subject></subj-group></article-categories><title-group><article-title>Book Reviews</article-title></title-group><contrib-group><contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Stubbs</surname><given-names>Michael</given-names></name><aff>UNIVERSITY OF TRIER, GERMANY</aff></contrib></contrib-group><pub-date pub-type="ppub"><month>10</month><year>1993</year></pub-date><volume>4</volume><issue>4</issue><fpage>470</fpage><lpage>473</lpage><custom-meta-wrap><custom-meta xlink:type="simple"><meta-name>sagemeta-type</meta-name><meta-value>Reviews</meta-value></custom-meta><custom-meta xlink:type="simple"><meta-name>search-text</meta-name><meta-value> 470 DISCOURSE & SOCIETY demonstrates is how the content and the putative upshot of the science re- ported in those articles is renegotiated during this round of submissions. The precise details of the knowledge being communicated to the scientific com- munity are subtly shaped during these negotiations over the acceptability of texts. For Myers, knowledge is inseparable from the textual forms in which it is embodied; accordingly, negotiating publication is simultaneously the social construction of knowledge. The three subsequent chapters see the same tools and techniques applied to a controversy pursued through the formal literature, to the presentation of these biologists' work in the popular science journals Scientific American and New Scientist, and to E.O. Wilson's highly influential and publicly contro- versial text on sociobiology. In each case Myers' careful and rather literary approach leads to a series of small insights which cumulatively add up to much more than the reader probably expects. Thus we see how the conventions of writing imposed in popular science articles operate to communicate a different view of scientific knowledge and of scientific practice from the one which the reader would derive from professional publications; Myers links this difference to current debates about the way the public understands science. Myers does not claim to be offering a new theory of how scientific know- ledge is constructed; he acknowledges that there is far more to science than just texts. But he also makes a skilful and persuasive case for texts being a convenient and profitable place to start the study of science. His professedly non-aligned analytic approach and his academic-but-humorous style will recommend this book to a diverse range of readers; there is much to learn from this book and it deserves to be widely read. Steven Yearley UNIVERSITY OF ULSTER SUSAN BERK-SELIGSON, The Bilingual Courtroom: Court Interpreters in the Judicial Process. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1990. xii + 299 pp. US$19.95 (pbk) ISBN 0-226-04373-8; 0- 226-04371-1 (hbk). JUDITH N. LEVI AND ANNE GRAFFAM WALKER, Language in the Judicial Process. New York and London: Plenum, 1990. xxix + 373 pp. US $55. ISBN 0-306-43551-9. These books show that discourse analysis can be highly relevant to social issues, and that such analysis can have important practical implications. A substantial literature has developed on language and the law. Berk- Seligson's book is in a series on 'Language and Legal Discourse', and Levi and Walker's is Volume 5 in a series on 'Law, Society and Policy'. Such work has not been merely descriptive and theoretical: linguists have been increasingly employed as expert witnesses in diverse court cases. These have included analyses of: disputes between 'ordinary people' and insurance companies over the interpretation of contracts; confessions alleged to have been fabricated by police; misunderstandings between Creole-speaking witnesses (e.g. Australian Aborigines) and police; and audio-recorded dialect to help with speaker identi- fication. Probably the best-known book, strongly recommended to readers new to this area, is O'Barr (1982). O'Barr is one of the creators of the field of Book reviews 471 language and the law. He is co-author of a paper in Levi and Walker, and co- editor of the series in which Berk-Seligson's book appears. Berk-Seligson's book deserves to become a classic of applied linguistics: it is a careful linguistic and ethnographic analysis in an area of crucial public concern, and it has important implications for the administration of justice. It won the 1991 BAAL (British Association for Applied Linguistics) prize for the year's best book in applied linguistics. The main chapters concern Spanish-English interpreting in American courts. The data were collected during seven months' fieldwork, and comprise 114 hours of audio-recorded courtroom proceedings involving 18 interpreters, plus fieldwork notes and interview data. The transcribed data were particularly carefully checked by independent transcribers (p. 51). There is useful dis- cussion of state legislation on court interpreting, standards of training and professional conduct for interpreters, and of problems over interpreting which have led to cases being taken to the appeals court. There is also a substantial sample of transcribed audio-recordings (so readers can check the data for themselves). The main analytic chapter is a study of differences between English and Spanish in the expression of causality, agency, responsibility and blame. This is clearly an area of meaning crucial to courts, and a substantial part of court- room language inevitably deals with such meanings. Any language has a var- iety of ways of talking about causation and agency. For example, English provides transitives, intransitives and passives with and without agent to talk about the 'same' event, but variously foregrounding or omitting the agent, including: * The defendant broke it. * It was broken by the defendant. * It got broken. * It broke. Spanish provides an overlapping but different set of possibilities, including two different reflexive constructions with no direct equivalent in English. The passive is syntactically possible in Spanish, but very formal, and hence rare in spoken language. (The passive is common in spoken English-language legal usage). These differences force interpreters to take decisions (possibly uncon- scious) in an area of meaning crucial to the conduct of court cases. Often no one-to-one translation equivalent exists. If, in addition, the interpreter is sym- pathetic or unsympathetic to the defendant or witnesses, there is considerable scope for skewing what is said. This is all thoroughly documented from the book's audio-recordings. Berk-Seligson concludes that the language used by interpreters can affect judicial proceedings in subtle or dramatic ways (p. 1). The foreword of Levi and Walker's book locates work on language and the law firmly within the tradition of 'legal realism'. A 'formal' tradition holds that correct decisions are reached in court cases if purely rational and deductive procedures are followed. A 'realistic' tradition argues, however, that the law is deeply involved in society and is influenced by social conditions, and such a tradition therefore accords importance to empirical reports on social behav- iour, including language. All the articles contain useful material, though they are mixed in quality and in approach. There are studies of the language of the court itself: these include conversation analysis and ethnographic studies of cross-examining strategies, plea-bargaining, small claims courts, and lawyer-client interaction. There is a 472 DISCOURSE & SOCIETY study, worrying in its implications, of how court reporters, who are supposed to transcribe 'verbatim' what is said in court, in fact transform it in many ways. There are discussions of problems in analysing clandestine recordings made by law enforcement agencies and used in court as evidence of drug dealing, bribery, etc. And there are psychologically oriented studies, based on cases where academics have served as expert witnesses, of how the 'ordinary' person might understand information on consumer products, such as health warnings on cigarette packets and instructions on cleaning sprays. (One article is essen- tially the same as an article in Berk-Seligson). As often in edited collections, the editors could have done more to make the book cohere. Levi reviews work on language and the law, but makes only rather vague proposals (p. 9) for the 'major conceptual categories' which are suited to investigating legal discourse: speech act theory, conversation analysis and communicative competence. But something more precise is needed than simply naming general areas of work and listing topics in a research outline (pp. 14, 29-30). The opportunity for a framework for applied linguistic work in the court- room is missed, and there are basic questions that are discussed in individual papers but not taken up systematically in the editorial discussion. They concern (1) the scientific status of textual analysis, (2) the presentation of analyses to lawyers and juries, and (3) the relation between 'expert' analyses and both common-sense and legal assumptions about language. (1) Discourse analysis can affect the outcome of civil and criminal trials. So analysts have the responsibility to say very explicitly how confident they can be of their analyses. Recent work on dis&ourse has tended to emphasize the open- ended nature of interpretation. But b th analytic aims and standards of proof differ in different social contexts, and the courts demand that things be proved 'beyond reasonable doubt'. So what standards of proof, replication or corroboration are possible? The scientific status of discourse analysis is dis- cussed in some detail by Green (pp. 261ff), and Johnson (pp. 300ff) is helpful on how texts will be interpreted by that strange legal fiction, the 'ordinary reasonable person'. (2) What of the resistance by courts to accepting expert evidence on lan- guage at all, especially when this concerns the language of the court itself ? The law considers itself to be an expert on language, as, of course, it is. The problem is that its expertise is differently conceived from conventional wisdom within linguistics. Furthermore the view is widespread that language is a common-sense matter which does not require special expertise. (This gets some discussion, again by Green, pp. 247ff.) Linguists are in a double bind here, since they have regularly argued that native speakers have special insight into their own language. But there is then a problem of how linguists should present their analyses to courts so that they relate to lawyers' concerns. 1 was recently employed to analyse a judge's summing up, which the defence considered biased against the defendant. The Appeals Court declined to consider my report, commenting: What the meaning is of the language used by a learned judge in the course of his directions to the jury is a matter for this Court to determine and is not a matter for any linguistic expert. ... Clear enough, but indicative of a major problem of communication! (3) Levi and Walker make a probably premature call for a 'new discipline' (p. 355) of language and the law. Linguists working as expert witnesses cer- Book reviews 473 tainly have a responsibility to become familiar with legal issues and with the particular ways in which the law treats language and meaning. But the con- tinual fragmentation of language study should be resisted. There are many other areas where linguistic expertise is applied to public issues, and where similar questions arise of professional standards: these include language and the law, language and education, and language and intercultural communi- cation. It would be unfortunate if linguists working in these various areas lost touch with each others' experience of similar problems. Reference O'Barr, W.M. (1982) Linguistic Evidence. New York: Academic Press. Michael Stubbs UNIVERSITY OF TRIER, GERMANY JOEL C. SHEESLEY AND WAYNE C. BRAGG, Sandino in the Streets. Bloom- ington: Indiana University Press, 1991. xxvi + 117 pp. ISBN 0-253- 35207-x. Sheesley's and Bragg's beautifully produced, slim volume includes a prologue by Ernesto Cardenal and an introduction by Jack Hopkins, the series editor, as well as an essay by Joel Sheesley. The main body of the book, however, consists of photographs taken by Sheesley in 1985 of images of Sandino (stencils, drawings, posters, etc.) in the streets of Nicaragua. The photographs run side by side with extracts of Sandino's own writings, some 50 years earlier, edited and translated by Wayne Bragg. A timeline at the bottom of each page gives a brief account of the major political and historical events of the period from which Sandino's passages are drawn. Both the essay and the book as a whole invite us to contemplate the nature and use of images, the readings and readabilities of visual inscriptions, and the character of political praxis. Sheesley's text is interesting, both for the points it raises, and for those it misses: a tension runs through it between treating the images-in-the-street as merely 'signs' and treating them as features of actions that have a transformative and performative character. He correctly empha- sizes the contextual sense of the images. An image of Sandino sprayed onto a wealthy house signifies something different to the same image sprayed onto a peasant's shack-the site 'influences the image's interpretation'. But Shees- ley's point needs to be pushed further-context is not merely a matter of influence, but a condition of intelligibility. The production of the image-in-the- street is a communicative act-how that act is to be understood and categor- ized depends on the category assignable to its agent, as well as the category assignable to its recipient, and the setting within which it is produced (think of the differences that constitute a shooting as a suicide, a murder, or an act of war). Moreover, the images-in-the-street are not only signs (of protest, national honor, mythical longing, etc.): they are inscriptions produced from within, and as features of, some ongoing situated practice, some unfolding trajectory of tasks and relevances. The praxiological character of 'images' (and other communicative forms) is important to explore for a number of reasons. One of them is that it opens up the way to the analytic understanding of the character of cumulativity in social </meta-value></custom-meta></custom-meta-wrap></article-meta></front><back><ref-list><ref><citation citation-type="book" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>O'Barr, W.M.</surname></name> (1982) <source>Linguistic Evidence</source>. <publisher-loc>New York</publisher-loc>: <publisher-name>Academic Press</publisher-name>.</citation></ref></ref-list></back></article></istex:document></istex:metadataXml><mods version="3.6"><titleInfo lang="en"><title>Book Reviews</title></titleInfo><titleInfo type="alternative" lang="en" contentType="CDATA"><title>Book Reviews</title></titleInfo><name type="personal"><namePart type="given">Michael</namePart><namePart type="family">Stubbs</namePart><affiliation>UNIVERSITY OF TRIER, GERMANY</affiliation></name><typeOfResource>text</typeOfResource><genre type="review-article" displayLabel="review-article"></genre><originInfo><publisher>SAGE Publications</publisher><place><placeTerm type="text"></placeTerm></place><dateIssued encoding="w3cdtf">1993-10</dateIssued><copyrightDate encoding="w3cdtf">1993</copyrightDate></originInfo><language><languageTerm type="code" authority="iso639-2b">eng</languageTerm><languageTerm type="code" authority="rfc3066">en</languageTerm></language><physicalDescription><internetMediaType>text/html</internetMediaType></physicalDescription><relatedItem type="host"><titleInfo><title>Discourse & Society</title><subTitle>An International Journal for the Study of Discourse and Communication in Their Social, Political and Cultural Contexts</subTitle></titleInfo><genre type="journal">journal</genre><identifier type="ISSN">0957-9265</identifier><identifier type="eISSN">1460-3624</identifier><identifier type="PublisherID">DAS</identifier><identifier type="PublisherID-hwp">spdas</identifier><part><date>1993</date><detail type="volume"><caption>vol.</caption><number>4</number></detail><detail type="issue"><caption>no.</caption><number>4</number></detail><extent unit="pages"><start>470</start><end>473</end></extent></part></relatedItem><identifier type="istex">F934978064F9BA2E91EBAC614DCC86B7EA9CC2F9</identifier><identifier type="DOI">10.1177/0957926593004004005</identifier><identifier type="ArticleID">10.1177_0957926593004004005</identifier><recordInfo><recordContentSource>SAGE</recordContentSource></recordInfo></mods></metadata><serie></serie></istex></record>Pour manipuler ce document sous Unix (Dilib)
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