(De)constructing “verbatimness”: a study of speech reporting strategies in the late modern Flemish courtroom

Speech reporting and reported speech are omnipresent in courtroom discourse and often regarded as crucial for presenting evidence during trial. Contemporary courtroom procedures emphasize the importance of accurately preserving previous speech, ideally aiming for a verbatim (word-for-word) record. However, the process of reporting speech rarely involves literal, unbiased replication of past utterances, making actual “verbatimness” largely unachievable. While the “verbatimness standard”, feasible or not, is commonplace in today’s courtrooms, its historical development and applicability in the past remain relatively unexplored. Using a combination of corpus-driven, statistical approaches and qualitative discourse analytic methods, the present study examines how speech is reported in late modern Flemish courtroom records, how the use of speech reporting strategies changes across time and how these strategies are set against the background of legal procedures and genre conventions. Additionally, the analysis explores different pragmatic and discursive functions of speech reporting to determine if (and how) they contribute to the construction of “verbatimness”. The study is further complemented by an examination of contemporaneous instruction manuals and training materials for scribes to gain a better understanding of conventions and regulations governing the process of drafting documentation in 19th-century Flemish courtroom.