Functional Inter-Textuality in the Spoken and Written Genres of Legal Statutes: A Discursive Analysis of Judge’S Summing-Up and Lawyers’ Closing Arguments in Adama High Criminal Court

• Authors: Ejarra Batu Balcha
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

This study examines the intertextual influence of the courtroom spoken genre with the written genre used by judge’s summing up and lawyers’ closing arguments in Ethiopian Criminal court trial. In doing so, it employs the relational and comparison-expository structuring models. The relational struc- turing is used to give emphasis to the manner in which evidence items bear on particular issues and shows how evidence items are related to each other and to major facts in issues of judge’s summing-up while the comparison-expository structure is to intertextually link the spoken genres of the two opposing lawyers’ views with the Ethiopian criminal law written statutes. The findings of the study suggest that mixed rhetorical strategies, the judge’s relational summing up and the lawyers’ comparison-expository closing arguments, are more effective than a strict narrative strategy in addressing the final judgment of the argumenta- tion

Keywords

EN

closing arguments; comparison-expository; genre; inter-textuality; summing up

• Publisher: Sciendo
• Journal: Studies in Logic, Grammar and Rhetoric
• Year: 2014
• Volume: 38
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 7-25

Dates

published

2014-09-01

online

2014-11-05

Contributors

author

Ejarra Batu Balcha

• Adama Science and Technology University Adama, Ethiopi

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Identifiers

DOI

10.2478/slgr-2014-0029