REFORMULAÇÕES DE PERGUNTAS A PARTIR DAS MANIFESTAÇÕES DE OBJEÇÃO NO TRIBUNAL DE JUSTIÇA ESTADUNIDENSE: UM ESTUDO DE CASO

Abstract

ABSTRACT

The aim of this research is to analyze question reformulations based on objections raised in an American Court of Law in Orange County, Florida, focusing on how the prosecutor rephrases his questions during the interrogation phase. The theoretical framework is based on the interface between the concepts of Conversation Analysis and Forensic Linguistics, and the corpus is composed of recordings of the trial of Danielle Redlick, who was accused of murdering her husband in 2019. The investigation consisted of five days of trial and ranged from two to eight hours. The videos are available on the YouTube platform on the Internet, and the recordings were transcribed according to Preti (2003). This work followed the empirical-inductive method, considering that the texts under analysis were obtained from a real interactive situation, formulated at the moment of speaking, thus containing typical elements of spoken language. It is a case study in which we also used bibliographic and descriptive research as auxiliary techniques in the analysis of the corpus. According to the findings, at the accusation stage, the most frequent objections were: relevance, narrative, argumentative, misstates evidence and speculation. There was a predominance of objections raised by the prosecutor with the aim of obtaining responses more favorable to the purposes of convicting the defendant, rephrasing his questions in the following ways: by complete deletion of the original question; by partial deletion of previous content; by transforming parts of what was said; and by preserving what was said. Although the latter did not appear so often, it also served the purpose of supporting the prosecutor’s efforts to convict the defendant, promoting justice and ensuring compliance with the law.

Keywords: Conversation Analysis. Objection. Reformulations. American Court of Law.