The Old Bailey Proceedings: quoted dialogue and speaker commitment in witness testimony

Witness testimony in a trial is a first-person narrative (Olsson 2004) or sub-narrative (Tiersma 1999) which is elicited by the direct examiner, and precedes the prosecution lawyer’s cross-examination. The present investigation quantitatively and qualitatively examines a corpus of a dozen transcripts (1844-1887) of the trial proceedings of female prisoners charged with the offence of birth concealing. The transcripts were selected from The Old Bailey Proceedings Online, a fully searchable website providing accounts of all the trials of crimes committed in London and Middlesex between 1674 and 1834. Direct and indirect speech are used alternatively in the narratives by the witnesses in an attempt to reproduce the actual dialogues that occurred at the time in which the offence was discovered and the dead body of a newborn was found. Indirect speech is a rephrasing or paraphrasing of original speech and is generally acknowledged as a more complex communicative strategy than direct speech, which is usually a mere mimicking of the original words through which reporters act out the role of the reported speaker providing a vivid and dramatic presentation (Li in Coulmas, 1986, p. 40). On the other hand, as Tannen (in Coulmas, 1986, p. 320) underlines, the attribution of “exact fidelity” to quoted dialogue can be considered “naïve to the point of absurdity”. Applying the notion of “speaker commitment” to appraise veracity in language (Olsson, 2004, p. 123), the present study tries to ascertain whether indirect speech can be considered as an example of “distancing language”, testifying witnesses’ resolve to distance themselves from their statements, in juxtaposition with quoted dialogue as an instance of “associative language”, showing witnesses’ commitment and emotional involvement in reporting the event and their readiness to add precision in order to enhance their credibility