Abstract

The great tradition of Occidental philosophy is enlivened by the obsession with (un)certainty (Wittgenstein 1969). It inspired several theories concerning ways and limits of knowledge as a form of control over the world by human beings (McBurney e Parsons 2001) as well as refined models about the degrees of plausibility of trust as basic justification for human relations. In a such cultural horizon, the psycholinguistic perspective aims to get in the common speech dynamics (Mininni, 2000). One of them is evidentiality, that is a wide range of stances the enunciator can take on the nature of information proposed by his textual world – assertion, belief, opinion, inferences, etc. – and on its quality – reliability, pertinence and so on (Wesson & Pulford 2009). The contexts of legal communication are characterized by the maximum strain between the spread of doubtfulness and the aspiration to certainty. The distance between the versions of events proposed by prosecution and defense is a clear evidence of the sense-making dynamic that marks human condition as “insecuritas” (Semerari 1980). The analysis of legal contexts allows to catch the complex process of discursive construction of (un)certainty, that interweaves references on both epistemic and value axis typical of a specific sense-enunciative community. In the discursive sphere of the “court” institution, all the enunciative positioning acted by those who incriminate, defend, testify, guarantee and judge, disclose the several ways to relate to (un)certainty of their textual worlds. As a consequence, the meaning of “evidentials” (Jakobson 1956; Haviland 1989) is overdetermined by specific rhetoric structures that set up a wide range of personal styles in the (un)certainty management. The analysis of texts produced in different phases of various judicial debates aims to display the dialogical principle (Bakhtin 1981) pertaining to a specific modulation of evidentiality expressed by deontic forms (e.g. “it must be”). They can be interpreted as a trace of the opportunity to emphasize the ethical roots of each claim for certainty (Hermeren 2011)

Autore Pugliese

• Mininni Giuseppe , Grattagliano Ignazio

Tutti gli autori

• MININNI G.;GRATTAGLIANO I.

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Anno di pubblicazione

2014

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Settori ERC

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Codici ASJC

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