O princípio da cooperação em contexto forense : as máximas conversacionais em audiências judiciais

Abstract

This work aims to analyze, from a sociointerational perspective of the spoken language, the Cooperative Principle in forensic interactions in order to indicate the fulfillment or the violation of Grice’s conversational maxims (1975) in the responses of victims and defendants in legal proceedings. The theoretical framework of this research is based on the inter-relationship among the principles of Conversation Analysis, Pragmatics and Forensic Linguistics, especially on the works of Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson (1974), Koch (2015, 2016), Marcuschi (1986), Caldas-Coulthard (2014), Couthard and Johnson (2010), and Coulthard (2014). As we focus on institutional talk in forensic settings, the corpus is composed of audio recordings of court hearings in Mirandópolis (a city located in the state of São Paulo), which were transcribed according to Preti (2003). In relation to the structure, this work is composed of three chapters: in chapter one, we present some aspects concerning the spoken language and Pragmatics; the second chapter deals with Forensic Linguistics and interaction in legal contexts; in the third chapter, we describe the methodology and the constitution of the corpus, followed by the analysis and data discussion. Finally, the final remarks are shown. According to the findings, we point out that the speakers violated, in most cases, the conversational maxim of quantity: sometimes they spoke less than what was requested, and sometimes they spoke more than what was requested. In an attempt to demonstrate that their contributions were true, the deponents sought to fulfill the maxim of quality, and toward the maxim of relation, their contributions were largely relevant. Regarding the maxim of manner, it was less respected by the speakers: in many moments, their speeches were ambiguous, prolix and disorderly.