Abstract

Legal workplaces, in addition to their understandable significance for the participants, provide fertile ground for linguists. Our understanding of the language processes used in legal settings has been enlightened through the frameworks of discourse analysis, conversation analysis, interactional sociolinguistics, and ethnography of speaking. These reveal the constructive and emergent nature of interaction in these settings, confined as they often are by their varying institutional practices. In outlining both previous and current strands of research this chapter considers a variety of legal settings, including courtrooms, police–lay interactions, lawyer–client interaction, judicial language, and situations involving cross-cultural miscommunication.