Practicing Linguistics Without a License

6 Unless he has three or four arms: Enacting evidence

The past several decades have seen a surge of scholarly interest in reported speech in the law – and for good reason. The decontextualization and recontextualization (or interdiscursivity) of written and verbal language represent the evidential infrastructure of both the adversarial and inquisitorial systems. Researchers in forensic linguistics or language and law have studied such interdiscursive structures in numerous legal contexts (see Heffer, Rock, and Conley 2013). In her study of a cocaine possession case, Philips (1986: 154) found that direct quotes were a more truthful and reliable form of evidence than other types of reported speech: “quoting is reserved for information related ...