Intertext.1uality, affect, and ideology in legal discourse

This article examines how attorneys and witnesses mobilize intertextuality, affect, and linguistic ideology to accomplish practical interactional tasks in a rape trial context. Drawing on Goffman, Bakhtin, and recent work by linguistic anthropologists in the area of metapragmatics, I analyze how complex interactions between grammar, prosody, and discursive style create a dense constellation of voices or footings, and index multiple social contexts in the legal order. I show how courtroom speakers shape evidence in testimony, project a particular social identity for themselves and for each other, andnaturalize their discursive authority through a complex array oflinguistic resources. More analytically, Ipropose that intertextuality in real-time conflict talk could fruitfully be studied as an explicit, blow-by-blow metapragmatic negotiation between courtroom participants, a dynamic process of framing, constraining, and appropriating one another's reported speech.