Pragmatic Features of English Courtroom Discourse: Theoretical Foundations and Methodological Approaches

Abstract

English courtroom discourse is a regulated form of institutional interaction in which linguistic choices perform procedural actions, distribute speaking rights, construct evidence, and shape assessments of credibility. This article examines the theoretical and methodological foundations required to analyse its pragmatic features. It uses a critical integrative review of foundational and contemporary work in pragmatics, conversation analysis, forensic linguistics, discourse studies, corpus linguistics, and court interpreting. The synthesis identifies seven interdependent domains: institutional speech acts, question design, presupposition and implicature, epistemic stance, face and relational work, narrative recontextualization, and interpreter mediation. The review shows that grammatical form alone cannot explain courtroom meaning. An utterance must be interpreted through procedural phase, participant role, sequential position, evidential status, and uptake by judges, counsel, witnesses, defendants, and interpreters. The article proposes a layered analytical framework that links institutional constraints with turn-by-turn action, pragmatic inference, and broader relations of power. It also sets out a transparent workflow for data selection, transcription, annotation, triangulation, reliability, ethics, and reporting. The framework is intended for research on English-language trials and hearings, including multilingual proceedings, and for advanced Legal English and forensic linguistics education. Its central methodological claim is that courtroom pragmatics is best studied through a combination of fine-grained sequential analysis and accountable distributional evidence.