Examining Discoursal Patterns among Judges and Defendants in Criminal Courts

The use of language and its elements is one of the appropriate tools in describing and detecting crime in the courts (Aghagolzadeh, 2012, 2013). The present study aimed at discovering the discoursal patterns (i.e., descriptive, descriptive and statistical) and their sub-categories (i.e., standard norm of speech, changing in the standard norm, and deviation from the standard norms of language proposed by McMenamin (2002). The purpose of this study is to identify the types of these deviations in the criminal courts. In legal communication, the judges use fewer deviations because they not only felt that they belonged to a higher social class (Coulthard, Johnson & Wright, 2017) but they also displayed their administrative power coming from their legal status (Fairclough, 1992). McMenamin notes if the accused persons belonged to the lower class of society, they could not use the standard norms of language and was drawn to deviations in the descriptive, descriptive and statistical norms of language. In this type of discourse, the personality and identity of the judges' speech may be affected by social and political power of the courts. Thus, court language as a specific register may affect the judges' conversations that can be alien to the criminal persons and accused ones. Therefore, the research question addresses the significant difference between the judges and defendants following the McMenamin's framework in using standard speech or changing and deviations from the norms of discourse in the criminal courts.