Fact-finding Evaluation and the Ordering of Speaking Turns in Legal Settings

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In recent years, sociolegal scholars have turned increasingly to the analysis of the language of disputing in order to better understand how law and legal processes work. Some have concentrated on the cultural logic of legal arguments, some have focused on the structure of narrative, and others have been concerned with the formal attributes of speaking styles. The one element stressed in discourse in legal settings is that the structure of the discussion varies with the function of the discussion and, in particular, that fact-finding and evaluation look very different in legal proceedings. This project will look at the relationship between the ordering of speech and fact-finding and evaluation in a cross-cultural study of law in India. It is argued that fact-finding and evaluation are distinct functions, and discussions associated with each have a distinct order. Specifically, the project examines whether speaking-in-turn in legal settings is associated with fact-finding and overlapping speech is associated with evaluation. To test the hypothesis that the ordering of discussion varies by goals, council dispute resolution decisions in two Indian castes will be analyzed and compared. The two castes are of similar cultural background but their councils vary in the degree of fact-finding involved in proceedings. One council focuses on evaluation and the facts are rarely in dispute; the other council is more likely to contain participants unfamiliar with the facts of the dispute. Standard methods of discourse analysis involving audio recording of arguments will be used along with observations, interviews, and analysis of contextual and secondary data. This study should add to our understanding of how the ordering of speech relates to disputing and dispute resolution. The India context permits controlled comparison of the relationship between "formality" and "informality" and dispute processing. In addition, this research will make valuable contributions to the anthropology of law, discourse analysis, and understanding of the social forms and cultural patterns in India.//