Narrative and Anti-Narrative Use in Legal Discourse

Abstract

Language and its use in legal discourse have been the subject of many studies. At the same time, one of the interesting and relevant areas of study is court discourse and trial space. Heffer (2005) presents a model based on his researches and previous studies, in which the discourse of the court consists of two genres of narrative and anti-narrative. In the present research, the authors follow Heffer to study the role of "narration" in space and the discourse of the court and emphasize the complex nature of the genre of the trial space so that based on the analysis of data, a model conforms to the judicial environment in the courts of the country will be presented. By the use of complex genre, we mean to use narrative with anti-narrative genres together. It should be noted that the data of the present study are based on the corpus composed of twenty-six criminal cases in all three stages of the police station, public prosecutor’s office, and the court of Shiraz. Key words: legal discourse, narrative, anti-narrative, paradigmatic mode, complex genre.

Keywords

• legal discourse
• narrative
• anti-narrative
• paradigmatic mode
• complex genre