The Roles of Reflexivity in Meaning Negotiation and Sense-Making in a Courtroom Genre

Underpinned by the assumption that every message carries a metamessage (Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, Ballantine, 1972), embodying an interplay between what is said and how it is said, this study examines metapragmatic expressions lawyers use in their closing speech. Based on three Anglo-American capital trials, the analysis identifies the forms and pragmatic functions of such expressions. The findings indicate that metapragmatic expressions are integral to this genre, including performatives, commentaries, descriptions of the interactional principles, and message glosses. Capital  lawyers struggle to gain control over these expressions to negotiate and make sense of the desired sentence choice, just as much as they do the strategic control of the propositional content.