Socio-legal Discourse Analysis of a Selected Court Proceeding

Abstract

Socio-legal discourse is an emerging interdisciplinary area of research in which laws or legal documents are analysed via a sociolinguistics’ lens. This paper identifies and discusses the relationship between language and law in a selected court proceeding. The researchers identify some features of discourse, which include exchange, move and act. The analysis adopts Sinclaire and Courlthard’s (1975) discourse rank scale and places court proceedings under the rank of lesson. A bottom-top approach is adopted in this placement such that at the level of discourse acts, the analysis focuses on informative, elicitation and directive acts. In the discussion, the paper examines some discourse elements such as "focusing and framing move," "opening and answering move," as well as "follow-up move." For the socio-legal components of the text, discourse cohesion and coherence are used as tools of analysis. This paper reveals that these discourse features used in legal documents help to unify the sequence of events during court proceedings. Thus, it concludes that an understanding of these socio-legal discourse structures will provide greater insights into the examination of legal proceedings in law courts in Nigeria.