Reportative term of evidentiality in selected opening statements a study in legal discourse

Abstract EN

The current study is mainly intended to shed light on Legal Discourse in general, and the evidential Sources in prosecutors and defense attorneys' opening statements in particular.

Accordingly, a corpus of fourteen opening statements, is chosen to be analyzed according to Alexandra Aikhenvald's (2018) categorization for Evidentiality in the English language.

Data analysis has shown that the reportative term of evidentiality has reoccured more than the directive and the inferential terms of evidentiality.

And thus it has the greatest frequency.

For that, it was used (233) times in the fourteen opening statements represented by prosecutors and defense attorneys.

This result proves that attorneys tend to use quoted words in their statements to increase its level of reliability and fixedness.

And consequently captivate the attention of the jurors and manipulate their decisions.

Moreover, the study also shows that the frequency of the Reportative term of evidentiality in the defense attorney's statements is greater than in the prosecution statements