Full Description
Language ideology is a concept developed in linguistic anthropology to explain the ways in which ideas about the definition and functions of language can become linked with social discourses and identities. In Entextualizing Domestic Violence, Jennifer Andrus demonstrates how language ideologies that are circulated in the Anglo-American law of evidence draw on and create indexical links to social discourses, affecting speakers whose utterances are used as evidence in legal situations. Andrus addresses more specifically the tendency of such a language ideology to create the potential to speak for, appropriate, and ignore the speech of women who have been victims of domestic violence. In addition to identifying specific linguistic strategies employed in legal situations, she analyzes assumptions about language circulated and animated in the legal text and talk used to evaluate spoken evidence, and describes the consequences of the language ideology when it is co-articulated with discourses about gender and domestic violence.
The book focuses on the pair of rules concerning hearsay and its exceptions in the Anglo-American law of evidence. Andrus considers legal discourses, including statutes, precedents, their application in trials, and the relationship between such legal discourses and social discourses about domestic violence. Using discourse analysis, she demonstrates the ways legal metadiscourses about hearsay are articulated with social discourses about domestic violence, and the impact of this powerful co-articulation on the individual whose speech is legally appropriated.
Andrus approaches legal rules and language ideology both diachronically and synchronically in this book, which will be an important addition to ongoing research and discussion on the role legal appropriation of speech may have in perpetuating the voicelessness of victims in the legal treatment of domestic violence.
Contents
Acknowledgements ; Note on trial citation format ; Introduction: Language Ideology in the Hearsay Doctrine and the Modern Excited ; Utterance Exception to Hearsay ; Chapter 1: Legal Discourse of Domestic Violence: Language Ideology and Trustworthiness ; Part I: Anglo-American Law and the In/admissibility of Hearsay ; Chapter 2: Legal Empiricism in/and the Language Ideology of Hearsay ; Chapter 3: Social Discourses about Domestic Violence and Hearsay: Interdiscursivity and Indexicality in the US Supreme Court ; Part II: The Excited Utterance Exception in US v. Hadley ; Chapter 4: Making the Excited Utterance Legally Intelligible: Shifting Audiences, Contexts, and Speakers ; Chapter 5: The Attribution and Disattribution of Discursive Agency in the Excited Utterance Exception to Hearsay ; Chapter 6: Conclusions: Language Ideology and the Legal Accounting for Domestic Violence
