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LEGAL LANGUAGE: Pragmatics, Poetics, and Social Power

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Elizabeth Mertz
American Bar Foundation and Northwestern Uni versity School of Law, Chicago, Illinois 60611
KEY WORDS: law, language s tructure, contextualization, politics of discourse, social construc
tion of legal categories

INTRODUCTION
Recent work in linguistic anthropology has generated new and exciting per spectives on the vital role of contextualization in language meaning and func tion. At the same time, scholarship on legal language has begun to develop a more social and constructionist vision of the way linguistic processes affect the workings of the law at many levels. This review places some of the scholarship on legal language within the context of current linguistic-anthro pological understandings of language use and contextualization, to develop a framework for further work on language and law. It also draws on work in legal scholarship that has illuminated the politics of legal discoursc, to dcmon strate how this kind of approach can enliven anthropological understandings of the social grounding of language.

SOCIAL GROUNDING AND LANGUAGE STRUCTURE: PRAGMATICS, POETICS, AND SEMANTICS IN CONTEXT
Recent work by anthropologists, linguists, and sociolinguists has moved our understanding of language to more social and contextual levels. In contrast with traditions that concentrate on language as an abstract system (giving little attention to its actual use as a medium of social exchange), and with ap-

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proaches that focus on how language effects social ends (without much con sideration of linguistic systems as structures with dynamics of their own), linguistic anthropologists and sociolinguists have been developing a more integrative way of understanding language as a structure-in-use (e.g. 6,81,84, 100--102, 110,116,117,210,213,217, 218). To an understanding oflanguage as formal grammatical structure (206) and a concern with instrumentalist functions of language, this work adds a further insight: language also embod ies social creativity (5, 82, 213, 221). This insight can be viewed as supple menting, rather than contradicting, other perspectives. There are certainly in

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ternal dynamics that are an important part of how language works, and lan guage sometimes functions as a reflection or implementation of social dynam ics. But current work has just begun to explore the systematic ways in which language performs a creative role in the dynamics of social change, connec tion, and rupture-and in the ongoing constitution of social epistemologies (4, 18,22,23,25,28,36,64,74,75,82,86,87,103,104,133,134,154, 155,161, 165,213,216,217,220,240). Further, this social-linguistic creativity is not random, but rather is impli cated deeply in language structure (see especially 217, 221, 223), a discovery with broad implications for those seeking to understand social interaction in general. If language is the key medium through which social exchmge and understanding are accomplished-and if, furthermore, this does not occur in haphazard fashion but in a deeply structured way-then it becomes vital to develop a thorough analysis of the linguistic channeling and struCluring of social life. This is particularly important in the domain of law, which is so often (particularly in Western capitalist societies) a key locus of institutional ized linguistic channeling (123, 235) of social power (see 7, 31, 108,121; for particular arguments and examples, see 33,35,43-45,71,149,150, 154,155,

158,237).
The line between language as an instrument or reflection of social dynamics and language as an active participant in social construction is a fine one. On the one hand, we know that minute details of linguistic variation often reflect divisions of gender, race, class, ethnicity, and other socially-salient categories (e.g. 27, 29, 61, 119, 145, 146, 183, 192, 197, 225,227,234). On thc other hand, much of the power of sociolinguistic analysis lies in its ability to map convincingly the ways in which language use not only conveys information (semantic meaning), but also expresses and reflects social divisions and in equalities (pragmatic or contextual meaning). Language here serves as a re flection or mirror of social structure and process, a particularly fine-tuned diagnostic of social morphology. Similarly, instrumentalist approaches see language as a tool used more or less transparently by actors to effect social ends. These social goals can be defined narrowly, posed in terms of micro-contexts of speaking [for example,

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a speaker can use linguistic devices such as tropes, repetition, and imagery to maintain audience interest (see 224)], or they can encompass the broader social contexts in which more global battles over social power are enacted (see 66). An instrumentalist analysis focuses on the role of language as a vehicle for the reproduction and contestation of existing social divisions. This ap proach highlights the social sources and shaping of inequalities and resistance, while linguistic forms become a focus only as resources to be manipulated in service of reproduction and contestation. Both reflectionist and instrumentalist approaches to language-and-society capture important aspects of language function. In both cases, language is important because it provides a window on social process; it is viewed as an expression of social context and contest. Language can also be understood as an integral part of the constitution of social contexts and contests [what can be called, adapting from Silverstein (2I5a), the "language-as-society" ap proach]-and as nontransparent, with dynamics of its own that contribute to social results (113, 114, 217). At the same time, language is integrally struc tured by its contexts of use, strongly and inherently social in character (see 4, 5,59,82, 114, 153,221). Thus a nontransparent view of language can still avoid linguistic determinism, by stressing the social grounding and nature of language structure and use.

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Context in the Structure oj Discourse

A number of recent articles and volumes evidence the renewed vigor with which linguists are pursuing the study of the contextual organization and operation oflanguage (e.g. 5, 17,20,22-24,28,36, 37a, 57-59,64,65, 74,86, 87,89,92,93,95,103, 112, 133, 134, 160, 173,177, 179, 191,208,209,213, 221, 222, 223, 240). A focus on indexical ( l81) and metapragmatic structur ing; concern with performance, recontextualizations, and audience; interest in the interlinguistic contexts of poetic and co-textual structuring; and studies integrating linguistic detail with broad social currents all exemplify this trend. However, although anthropologists and linguists are returning to a focus on the social and contextual structuring of discourse in recent years,our under standing of pragmatic and poetic structure as central to language has roots in the scholarship of the Prague School and of Jakobson, Whorf, and Sapir, among others (e.g. 5,86,133a, 214, 221). Gal (74),Irvine (103),Philips (191), and Woolard (240, 242) further direct our attention to the ways in which contextual understandings of language can be integrated with social theoretic traditions. In contrast with instrumentalist views of language function,which focus on the purposive use of language to attain social goals,this structured and contex tualist vision of language takes into account the unpredictability or lack of transparency that results from the complicated social structuring of language.

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One can focus on how a particular set of linguistic forms (e.g. a working-class dialect, political oratory, or repetition) can be mobilized relatively predictably to achieve certain goals (e.g. to reproduce class structure, to resist hegemonic forces, or to keep an audience's attention). But purposive usage may be limited in its capacity to achieve the intended effects by complex, deeply rooted, socially-responsive, and creative aspects of language structure-aspects of language that go beyond surface awareness and encode the multifaceted, al ways shifting, shared understandings of communities across time (see 113,

114, 217). Social actions and events, both purposive and unintended, impact
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language use and structure, producing results that reflect both the original social impulse and its channeling through language. A re-regimenting process occurs that is socially motivated but also responsive to a peculiarly linguistic systematicity. This systematicity is not entirely language-internal or asocial, because even the systematicity of language is socially grounded in crucial ways. However, the new form of linguistic analysis envisions a different kind of social function for language, one that includes a moment of linguistic creativity.
How do we understand the social grounding of the systematicity of lan

guage? We can fmd examples of the newly emerging approach to this issue in
Bauman and others' concern with performance, Gumperz's conception of

contextualization cues, and Silverstein's theories regarding pragmatic and metapragmatic structure (but also see the many sources cited above). In each case, there is a reversal of the common emphasis on decontextual Semill1tic and syntactic structuring as the core or dominant feature of language. It is perhaps not surprising that many scholars have privileged this referential aspect of language, because it is an aspect that is arguably more accessible to conscious reflection than are pragmatic structural features (see 215). The ability to use grammatical structure to convey semantic information may also be what ren ders human language "unique among natural semiotic systems" (see 135: 174; see also discussion in 153). And yet, the social-expressive function of language is what structures and makes possible the expression of semantic meaning (221). The translation of language into use in speech inescapably implicates an indexical structuring that is not merely a happenstance quality of individual situational use, but rather resounds through the very system of gramma r itself. From the vantage of language as it is actually used in human interactions, indexicality

is pri

mary, and expressing semantic meaning is one of the many functions language fulfIlls while performing in context. Thus, semantic meaning can be seen as a special subset of pragmatic function, rather than pragmatics being a problem atic wrinkle in the transmission of semantic information. Observations on the grammatically "founding" character of deictic categories (114), and on the

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primacy of aesthetic over referential function (109, 169), support such an approach. Silverstein has located a number of key principles underlying the structur ing of indexical meaning (213, 214, 221). First, language operates against a backdrop of presupposed social knowledge that is variously encoded and enacted in indexical usage. Second, language use is continuously socially creative in its ongoing operation against that backdrop-4leploying and ruptur ing expectations, playing with categories and generating ambiguities, express ing and forming the fluid polyphony of social interaction. Finally,another key

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aspect of language is its ability to represent and refer to itself-its meta-level capacity. Thus a speaker can in multiple ways characterize the speaking that is under way as a type (or multiple types) of speech. In the move to this meta level of speech, a process of typification occurs that gives coherence to ongo ing speech as it anchors and reanchors sounds and meanings in contexts-con texts that the ongoing speech is also, at least partially, creating and changing

(221, 222). Current work on the crucial role of language ideology and meta
pragmatics in linking language and social structure further demonstrates the powerful role of meta-level representations of language in creating and alter ing social meanings (25, 26,37, 65,86,94,105,112,134,156,157,176,180, 191,209,214,221,233,242). Gumperz has similarly stressed the contextual anchoring of the structure of language: ... [the] channelling of interpretation is effected by conversational implicatures
based on conventionalized co-occurrence expectations between content and

surface style. That is, constellations of surface features of message form are the means by which speakers signal and listeners interpret what the activity is,
how semantic content is to be understood and how each sentence relates to what precedes or follows. These features are referred to
as

contextualization

cues (82:131).

Gumperz explores the centrality of contextual structuring not only for ef fective communication but also for production of grammatical utterances.

In

other words, grammatical structure, the indexical structuring of language use, and the social act of communication are intertwined inextricably. Similarly, Bauman's insistence that we examine oral narrative as performed "in the totality of all its events" (4: 114; see also

5, 6) pushes us toward an integrative

vision of language use, structure, and context. Bauman, Briggs (23, 25, 27, 28), Brenneis (17, 18, 19, 21), Irvine (102, 104, 105), and others concerned with performance and the role of the audience in communication have uncov ered the social dimensions of language forms and traditions often understood primarily in terms of semantic content or abstract structure (e.g. as contrastive typologies of variants of stories). Pioneering work on language socialization by Dchs and Schieffelin (176a, 177, 208, 210), and on child language by

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Hickmann

(92, 93), among others, is providing us with a fuller picture of the

contextual character of language as children first learn to use it--another argument for the primacy of pragmatics in language structure. As anthropolo gists and linguists have turned their attention to contextual structuring, a renewed emphasis on poetics aspects of speech

(28, 91), gesture (58), and prosody and musical (27, 226) has emerged, generating evermore socially

grounded analyses of language. Thus, the current focus on contextualization has opened some exciting avenues for future work. Such work promises to integrate the study of a broad

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range of linguistic and communicative levels-poetics, pitch and intonation, gesture, indexicals of other kinds, grammar, metalanguage, and ideology with a more social kind of analysis than scholars of language structure have attempted previously. And, as if that were not enough, there is more to be done, as we consider how to integrate semantic and content-focused analyses with the emergent focus on context.

Social-Linguistic Creativity
If language is structured in important ways by context, this contextually

organized language is also socially creative. As Duranti & Goodwin note, "Instead of viewing context as a set of variables that statically surround strips of talk, context and talk are now argued to stand in a mutually reflexive relationship to each other, with talk, and the interpretive work it generates, shaping context as much as context shapes talk"

(59:31). In a sense, sociolin

guists were already moving to this understanding of the relationship of context and talk when they analyzed ways in which ongoing usage delineating speak ers of differing social statuses continually recreated and reinforced social difference (e.g.

81, 116, 117).

If the newer work charts a different direction, that direction is in part toward an examination of the less predictable consequences of language use, places in which language does more than reinforce or maintain-often am biguous, uncertain, or difficult social-linguistic moments, moments of possi bility. For example, Herzfeld takes us through the details of a Cretan funeral in which a young woman deploys the poetics of a lament to protest "the categori cal definition of herself as a woman limited by her gender"

(91:251). Her

redefinition of herself and the situation, in a contextualized discourse, opens up new possibilities; she is able to escape the difficult bind within which she was left when her father died before she was married. Yet, Herzfeld also warns us that we cannot understand this as an unambiguously successful contestation of the hegemonic order, for the woman remains in many ways marginalized. Similarly, Hill

(94) traces the ambiguously counter-hegemonic role of lan

guage ideology for Mexicano speakers. The high-status men most likely to speak hispanized Mexicano wax nostalgic for former linguistic purity, while

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women and low-status men whose speech is more "pure" attack such nostal gia. This debate obscures the "most obvious function of Spanish loan words, which is to mark elevated Mexicano registers in which the discourses of power in the communities are conducted" (94:278). In these analyses, language is understood as a central medium of social exchange and connection between people, a link that forges shared cultural understanding, a process in which social structures-and legal systems--ex press their changing and unchanging characters (see

14,16,18,25,33,36,59, 75, 80, 147, 159, 162-164, 170, 191, 228, 241). This is an approach to

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language that fairly demands an accompanying social theory. How can this theory of meaning and its social construction, of language structure and speak ers' awareness, be informed by current work on social and psychological processes? Interestingly, scholarship from the language-and-Iaw field may provide some valuable links.

LEGAL LANGUAGE: AT THE CROSSROADS

In legal language can be found a crucial "crossroads" where social power and language interact. Law is, in effect, the locus of a powerful act of linguistic appropriation, where the translation of everyday categories into legal language effects powerful changes. Through legal language, the state imposes its inter pretations and its appropriations (of physical and symbolic power), and social actors struggle to shift existing power relations. For this reason, legal language affords a key site for advancing the social-linguistic project of unpacking the social and creative character of language use and structure. Legal scholars, with typically acute ears for the nuances of language and power, have already begun work that has affinities with anthropological-linguistic scholarship. So ciolinguists and anthropologists studying legal discourse have also in some ways converged on a contextual and nontransparent approach to language.

Law, Power, and Language

Recent years have witnessed the development in legal anthropology of a sophisticated discourse about the role of law in reproducing and contesting relations of power and of colonial domination (see

151; see also 15a 38, 39, 44,45,55a, 107, 120, 121, 148, 1 65,167,191,243). A searching examination
,

of the mutually-implicated constitution of legal power and cultural meaning is also under way (e.g. 43, 78a, 79, 80, 149, 150, 198-200). These emphases represent something of a shift from an earlier focus on the cross-cultural study of dispute processing. Critical legal scholars from different schools of thought, including Critical Legal Studies, Legal Feminism, and Critical Race Theory, have been similarly concerned about the role of law as a site for struggle over social power (e.g. 8,

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42, 54, 70, 71, 108, 139-141, 166). In recent years, work in critical race theory
and legal feminist theory in particular has generated sensitive treatments of the place of legal language in that struggle. Matsuda writes of the transformative force of language in legal arenas:
[Frederick] Douglass' skill in transfonning the standard text of American political life into a blueprint for fundamental social change is instructive. He chose to believe in the Constitution, but at the same time refused to accept a racist Constitution. In his hands, the document grew to become greater than some of its drafters had intended. Douglass' reconstructed Constitution in

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spired black readers to endure the tremendous personal costs of resistlmce. Martin Luther King, Jr.' s reconstructed Constitution produced the same effect in the twentieth century. This ability to adopt and transform stlmdard texts and mainstream conscious ness is an important contribution of those on the bottom. Black Ameri cans ...have turned the Bible and the Constitution into texts of liberation .... Those who lack material wealth or political power still have access to thought and language. . .. In poetry, the most concentrated fonn of language, black women have employed words to criticize and transfonn existing assumptions

(139:334-36).
Although this literature could gain from anthropological insights about the power of detailed and systematic aspects of language structure, it could also contribute to anthropological visions a more stringent sensibility about the relations of language, ideology, and power-particularly from the perspective of the disenfranchised. Increasingly, feminist legal and critical race theory scholars are turning to look more empirically at aspects of legal language. Fineman, for example, looks in detail at the language of legal and political texts that locate indigent "single mothers" as the source of a variety of social ills

(71; see also 70).

These traditions also urge careful attention to the ways in which the form of our own language shapes and limits our messages, working with alternative forms of discourse and voicing in order to contest the normal order of aca demic texts (e.g.

8, 237). This, of course, has been a concern of anthropolo

gists as well. For example, in a thoughtful attempt to overcome the removed voice of academic writing, Feldman's treatment of violence has suggested how the pragmatics of our own presentation might make certain topics difficult to represent without massive dislocation and distortion

(67; see also 46, 47).

Contesting the exclusion of voices through diversification of the people al lowed to speak in academic texts, which has long been central to critical-race and feminist legal theorists (see as well (e.g.

53a), is beginning to emerge in anthropology

85).

In a somewhat different (but similarly language-sensitive) vein, legal schol ars drawing on literary theory have advocated deconstructionist and other

LEGAL LANGUAGE

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approaches to legal language (see 3). White, an important pioneer of law-and literature studies,has argued that law is a process of translation in which legal texts shape and create reflective and responsive communities of discourse about central issues in our society (235). Cunningham approaches the attorney as a translator for and to clients (48, 49; see also 236). Drawing on literary, linguistic, and critical theory, a number of legal scholars have analyzed the stories told in the language of the law. Some have urged that storytelling is a counter-hegemonic form, a discursive structure suited to oppositionalists seek ing to disrupt the existing power structure as it is reproduced in legal language (e.g. 54, 136,207). More empirically oriented work on storytelling has pointed out that juries use story structures in reaching decisions, and that attorneys use story-telling and narrative in attempts to win juries over to their versions of the truth (1, 9, 129, 182). As legal scholars increasingly examine the empirical details of language use, they might benefit from the overarching framework afforded by anthropological linguistics in understanding the systematic con nections among those details. Social Construction in Legal Language Few realms of scholarship are better surveyed and summarized than are lan guage-and-Iaw studies. Levi has provided overviews of the broad range of work in this area (124-127), and there have been other reviews (20, 50, 172) and a number of collected essays in the area [cf 52,55 (section on law), 128]. With these excellent resources as a backdrop, this review eschews repetition and proceeds with a narrow and selective focus on the treatment of language structure and context in language-and-Iaw studies. Perhaps because the so cially powerful effects of language are highlighted in legal arenas, an aware ness of the formative effects of language pragmatics came early in the devel opment of language-and-Iaw studies. Work by psycholinguists demonstrated that legal outcomes can be very much affected by seemingly minor variations in language usage (see 32, 62, 131, 132). For example, in a study of the effects of language on eyewitness reports,Loftus found that subjects were more likely to report seeing a nonexistant object if asked "Did you see the broken head light?" than if asked "Did you see a broken headlight?" Linguistically, the difference between the and a is in the presupposing indexical meanings of the two terms; the presupposes a previously introduced referent, whereas a does not. At a more systemic level, anthropologists and psychologists examining the effects of speech style on credibility found that variation in clusters of prag matic features contributed to differential weighting of testimony (see 41, 63, 172, 173). Thus speakers who used a powerless speech style (i.e. associated with frequent use of intensifiers, hedges, hesitation forms, gestures, question ing intonation, tag questions, and politeness forms) were less likely to be

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believed than were speakers who used a powerful speech style (i.e. charac terized by an absence of those forms) (41, 63, 172, 173). The question of powerful versus powerless speech styles leads us to the next challenge: how to analyze more systematically the social foundations linking language and law. The powerless speech style, associated originally with women's speech (19), was found to characterize the speech of both men and women occupying more powerless social statuses (173). Conley & O'Barr have further posited a link between differential use of speech styles, deploy ment of different discourses (rule-oriented vs relational), and different legal

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ideologies (law as constraint vs law as enabling) (40). They suggest that even in informal courts that are purportedly dcsigncd to empower the layperson, upper-status and business people have an advantage because they 1. often use powerful speech styles, 2. tend toward a deductive discourse oriented around legal rules, and 3. generally maintain an ideology of the legal system that views law not as a broad social enablement, but as a limited-purpose, con straining system. Thus, ironically, small claims courts serve the interests of business people and experienced repeat players in the legal system better than they do those of the inexperienced consumer (40). Conley & O'Barr's study complicates these broad categories, showing us that not all judges are rule-ori ented, and that occasionally litigants who focus more on social relationships than on rules in their stories meet their matches in relationally-oriented judges. However, they conclude that the overall tendency in the system is toward a powerful, professional, business-friendly, rule-oriented language that further disenfranchises people who are at the lower end of the socioeconomic scale (and they note that this would have race and gcnder, as well as class, implica tions). Conley & O'Barr's work demonstrates that studies of legal language have potential for linking the details of pragmatic structure with the content of legal discourse and with broader socioeconomic considerations. This kind of analy sis suggests the ways in which language structure in the courtroom can exert a power of its own, becoming a crucial way in which the hegemonic order reasserts itself in an institutional structure supposedly designed to work against that order. At the same time, there is room for contestation and resis tance, and both judges and litigants make use of that opening from time to time-a conclusion supported by Merry's work on working-class citizens' use of the courts (148). Although Conley & O'Barr's sample is not large enough for such generalizations, their results indicate that the entry of women into the judiciary may be opening the courtroom to more social and relational and powerless discourses. A study examining the effects of powerful and power less speech styles on undergraduates, sitting judges, and practicing mediators further supports a non-determinist and complex view. Although both under graduates' and sitting judges' assessments of credibility were affected by

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speech style, mediators' were not (168). In that study, Morrill & Facciola returned to the sociolinguistic concept of the speech community in an attempt to understand what linguistic norms and practices might insulate mediators (in their institutional communities) from the effects of speech style. Thus several questions, also raised by the social-linguistic framework out lined at the outset, emerge from language-and-Iaw studies: 1. How do system atic aspects of language structure and use impact and mediate the social conflicts with which (legal) institutions deal? 2. How are both imposition of hegemony and moments of resistance made possihle in, through, and by (le gal) language? 3. In a related vein, how do we understand the complex and nondeterminist embodiment of social epistemologies in (legal) language? and 4. What is the role of ideology and meta-language in Lhe (legal) institutional regimentation and sedimentation of language-and in the linguistic regimenta tion and sedimentation of (legal) institutions?

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LANGUAGE STRUCTURE AND SOCIAL CONFLICT How do systematic aspects of language structure and use impact and mediate the social conflicts with which legal institutions deal? We can broadly distinguish two levels at which this question has been addressed in the literature: first, the way in which language operates situationally within legal contexts,and second, the broader social and cultural levels at which legal language works. Brenneis has elaborated a distinc tion between process-oriented and ethnography-of-speaking approaches that maps this difference fairly closely (20). Process-oriented work has focused on the immediate dynamics of the linguistic interactions in legal settings, combin ing ethnomethodological (34, 76) and conversational analytic (201) techniques in analyzing how participants in these interactions contest,manage, understand, and create social and legal realities in language (e.g. 1, 51, 53, 56, 90, 115, 118, 143, 144,193, 194). Scholars building from ethnography-of-speaking and other traditions have focused on scmantic and discourse-level phenomena as well, to link the workings of legal language with broader social aspects of conflict (e.g. 17-19, 22,57, 69, 77, 204).

Detailed work on situational usage in legal settings (and then subsequent renditions of that situational usage in legal texts) indicates that legal language operates in subtle and structured ways to constrain or translate litigants' and witnesses' speech-at times in a fashion not uniquely legal, and at times in quite distinctively legal modes (e.g. 10, 13, 30, 83, 111, 185-188, 190, 194196, 230, 231, 238, 239). Philips finds less copy of the question in response and more elaboration in responses from higher-status participants in court room discourse than from lower-status participants. This demonstrates the subtle level at which language structure instantiates and recreates social struc ture within a legal setting purportedly designed to neutralize such nonlegal effects (185). At the same time, the interactional process is a fluid one in

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which the power and relevance of certain kinds of linguistic usage (i.e. de scriptors) are constantly in flux, as the conversation helps to create its own ongoing context (194). At a wider level,legal language can be understood as culturally and socially constitutive as it forms an integral part of a culture's dispute process (see 19-22, 57, 77, 98, 99, 170). Brenneis, for example, suggests that dispute language is integral to the constitution of egalitarian as opposed to hierarchical social systems (18, 19). Greenhouse (79) and Rosen (198-200) suggest a deeply intertwined relationship between discourses dealing with conflict and the worldviews and social situations of entire communities (see also 11, 12, 22,102,170). This brings us to the next set of questions posed above. How are both imposition of hegemony and moments of resistance made possible in,through, and by legal language? And how do we understand the complex and nondeter minist embodiment of social epistemologies in legal language? Work on legal language is increasingly linking an understanding of micro linguistic processes with analysis of wider social change (see 10, 3 3 , 78, 80, 88, 96, 97, 106, 138, 159, 163,174-176). Much of the previous work in this area focused on the role of language in maintaining existing power relations, but attention is now beginning to focus as well on the openness of legal and linguistic practice to resistance, instability, and change-joining a wider trend in current social thought (see 15,36,38,39,44, 72, 75,120,121,211,237,240). Some scholarship concentrates on the interplay of hegemony and resistance in the individualized interactions of judges, lawyers, and clients with one another. Sarat and Fe1stiner analyze the ways in which the translation of clients' concerns into legal language-and of the legal system to dients channels and tames clients' demands, while also permitting a process of co construction in which some play is possible (69,202-205). Mather & Yngves son (137) and Felstiner et al (68) provide broad outlines of the process by which legal language channels social conflict. Cunningham (49) performs a detailed and sensitive analysis of lawyer-client interactions, arguing for the interesting step of cross-checking interpretive analysis with the subject of that analysis. This approach examines the ways in which microlinguistic channel ing of citizens' grievances reflects and effects the wider position of law in social conflict (see also 20, 31,35,60,142,148,149,152,167,175,212).
POWER RELATIONS, EPISTEMOLOGY, AND LEGAL LANGUAGE

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A similar picture emerges from attempts to link the details of linguistic structure in courtroom interactions with wider social processes (see 9, 40). Frohmann (73), Hirsch (96, 97), and Matoesian (138) discuss how patriarchal norms are imposed and contested in gendered discourse both within courts and with the courts' gatekeepers. Courts also serve as linguistic fora for struggles over the imposition of colonialist and racist discourses (see 45, 78,154).

LEGAL LANGUAGE

447

Alternatively, some analyses look to the epistemologies, cultural under standings, and social prerogatives broadly embodied in legal texts and dis courses for an understanding of the links between legal language and society (see

16,80, 154,155, 158, 159,164,165,184,229,233). This level of analysis

often requires some attention to the role of ideology.

IDEOLOGY AND META-LANGUAGE

What is the role of ideology and meta-lan

guage in the legal institutional regimentation and sedimentation of language

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and in the linguistic regimentation and sedimentation of legal institutions? This is an appropriate question with which to conclude the discussion, as it points to an area of inquiry just beginning to be explored-and so permits us to finish by pointing to the future (a favored finale in this genre). Explorations of lay ideologies of the law have uncovered a fascinating tendency on the part of litigants to rationalize the system even when they are dissatisfied with the result or process they received (see discourse,

40, 148; see also 130). This not-quite-conscious

process strongly resembles the process described by linguists for other kinds of which speakers are only dimly aware

in which key meanings are conveyed by features of discourse of (215).

Initial applications of linguistic work on ideology to law have revealed that legal doctrines are shaped by and responsive to semiotic processes and linguis tic ideologies

(159,178,180,219,220). At the same time, these processes and

ideologies do not arise sui generis, but are themselves the products of the complicated interplay of social contexts and actors, groups and patterned language use. As linguistic anthropologists are opening up the study of this process more generally (e.g.

95, 112, 134, 154,156,214, 242), we can antici

pate further applications of their findings to legal language.

CONCLUSION
There is an exciting convergence among a number of disciplines on the role of legal language as socially creative and constitutive in the struggle over power in and through law. Anthropological linguists have developed a framework that permits detailed consideration of the contextual structuring of language to be linked with analysis of wider social change and reproduction. Legal anthro pologists and critical legal theorists have outlined the ways in which law serves as a site for struggle and the imposition of hegemony. Legal theorists focusing sensitively on language from critical race theory, feminist, and de constructionist perspectives add a dynamic, daring, and vivid understanding of the impact of legal language in these struggles, also challenging academic writers to think more reflexively and carefully about the impact and shape of their own semiotic product. Scholars from the language-and-Iaw tradition have

448

MERTZ

for some time been investigating the formative role of language pragmatics in legal results and epistemologies. The framework developed by linguistic anthropologists, outlined at the beginning of this review, offers a useful template for merging the concerns of these various schools, providing an approach to language that unites details of grammar with contexts of many kinds. This should not be too difficult for language-and-Iaw scholars, who have been at work for some t ime on this combination of detailed linguistic and social contextual analyses. Work on legal language from social science and the legal academy can provide a more

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acute understanding of the political dimensions of legal language and, re flexively, of the texts that analyze legal language. We can best achieve a well-grounded understanding of the power of legal language, I would argue, through an analysis that systematically combines precise observation of the details of linguistic structure-in-use with consideration of the wider political and social forces at issue. Because legal language crystallizes the interplay of pragmatics, poetics, and social power with such clarity, it affords a crucial crucible for the formulation of social-linguistic theory.
An, Ann1 R,,"w "'.pre"

D .n, ",""d. d... in .n Ann"'" .,,',. "'.p.... may be p urchased from the Annual Reviews Preprints and Reprints service. 1800.3478007; 415.2595017; email: [email protected]

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