1
Part
TICKNOR’S LEGAL OUTLINES
Linguistics in Law School
Ethnography of
Communication
LINGUISTICS IN LAW SCHOOL
Ethnography of Communication
Copyright 2011by TickTalk Communications
600 New Jersey Avenue, NW
Washington, D.C. 20002
Phone 202.662.9401 • Fax 202.662.9412
Table of Contents
Introduction to Ethnography of Communication ........................ 1
You, Doin’ That Thing You Do! ................................................. 2
Setting the Precedent: Literature Review ................................. 4
Welcome to the Georgetown University Law Center ................ 7
On the Record: Looking at Field Notes ..................................... 8
A Guy Walks into the American Bar Association .................... 10
Hypothetically Speaking ......................................................... 13
Review Session...................................................................... 14
L I N G U I S T I C S
I N
L A W
S C H O O L
1
Chapter
Introduction to
Ethnography of
Communication
What does it mean to talk like a lawyer? And how does Law
School teach you how to do just that?
N
o one questions the importance of language in law school. Indeed, the
production and interpretation of language constitutes a large part of what it
means to “be a lawyer.” Embodying this professional role demands the
ability to parse large amounts of complex, jargon-rich text and utterances
considered so different from standard conversational English, it has its own name:
‘legalese.’ Although none of the prospective student brochures you poured over ever
mentioned a foreign language requirement, acquiring fluency in legalese is a
fundamental part of the education you receive in your three years of law school. Unlike
many other kinds of communicative competence, legalese is not simply "picked up";
it is a learned communicative skill or craft which produces a craftbound discourse
(Maley 1987). In other words, a significant aspect of learning how to be a lawyer
includes the acquisition—through trial and error—of a way of speaking, reading and
writing that is unique to the work of “doing law.” Law schools around the country are
tasked with teaching not only the laws themselves, but also the language of law. Law
school is a speech community where students are immersed in institutionally-specific
styles of writing, speech and thought. At the intersection of language
and community, we find a valuable nexus for learning.
“Legal communicative competence
is not simply "picked up"; it is a
learned communicative skill or
craft which produces a craftbound
discourse.”
The field of ethnography is primarily concerned with the
description of cultures. Although the word ‘culture’ itself can be tricky
to define, in the ethnographic context it can be said to refer to a group
which come together for a purpose and constitute a speech
community. The members of these communities share rules for
communication, interaction, cultural rules knowledge to help them
participate appropriately within the group (Saville-Troike). Since
language is fundamental to interaction, Dell Hymes proposes a hybrid endeavor where
1
L I N G U I S T I C S
I N
L A W
S C H O O L
linguistic description is combined with cultural observations. Our purpose in
conducting ethnography of communication is to examine not only what characterizes
law school language, but also how that language fits into the greater social life and
cultural practices of the community. Historically ethnographies were conducted by
studying those groups considered “exotic” (by comparison, at least, to the personal
experience of the academic likely to be conducting it): indigenous tribes, isolated rural
communities, and non-Western populations comprised the corpora. More recently,
however, ethnographers have turned towards smaller, local, institutionally-based
communities, such as places of business, schools and neighborhoods, as equally
opportune locations to conduct field work.
In this Linguistics in Law School®
outline, the ethnography of communication will be applied to just such a community:
law school.
THIS OUTLINE WILL SHOW HOW ETHNOGRAPHY ALLOWS US TO
MAKE LINKAGES BETWEEN LINGUISTIC PATTERNS AND
MEANINGFUL CULTURAL PRACTICES.
Beyond learning how to read a Supreme Court case, write a legal memo, or argue in
front of a jury, the linguistic practices law students acquire become a vital expression of
their membership within the law school ecosystem. Just as they may recognize another
law student by the case books under their arm, the stained WestLaw coffee mug in
their hand, or the myriad rainbow highlighters spilling from their pockets, the way they
speak also marks them as a member of that community. In order to understand what it
means to be a law student or a professor at law, we need to not only pay attention to
what is said, but also to what the traditions, norms and practices of the community are.
As ethnographer Tony Watson puts it, “to talk of someone’s identity surely requires
that, to a reasonable extent, we get to know them and the
context in which they live and work.”
“To talk of someone’s identity surely
requires that, to a reasonable extent, we get
to know them and the context in which
they live and work.”
You, Doin’ That Thing You Do!
While it may seem obvious at first, they key to
conducting ethnography with an eye—and ear—for
language, is to understand what it means to observe.
Erving Goffman, addressing an audience of fellow social scientists, noted that
the practice of participant observation is “done by one of two kinds of finks.
Police on the one hand and us on the other.” Many sociolinguists have
departed from the Chomskian notion that language should be analyzed more
or less apart from how it is used, and adopted the attitude of Hymes, who
asserts that language cannot be separated from how and why it is used (SavilleTroike).The value of ethnography lies in its interdisciplinary nature—using a
variety of methods we are able to construct a thick description, or what
Frederick Erickson calls a “Dagwood sandwich”
description. This is not to say that close linguistic
analysis is excluded, but rather, it is layered in
between paralinguistic and nonverbal observations.
Variety is seen not only in the type of data collected,
2
L I N G U I S T I C S
I N
L A W
S C H O O L
but how the data is collected. As Murielle Saville-Troike, points out, the
individual settings and ideas of appropriateness for “ethnographers should
thus command a repertoire of field methods from which to select according to
the occasion.” Rather than picking out a community that is best fit for the type
of analysis we wish to conduct, ethnography provides several methodological
frameworks for us to choose from—allowing us to tailor our data collection
to the community instead of the other way around.
M U R I E L
S A V I L L E T R O I K E ’ S
E L E M E N T S
O F
E T H N O G R A P H Y
I N C L U D E :
These include:
 Introspection
 Ideal / real distinction: e.g. drivers at a stop sign
 Participant Observation
 Observation
 Interviewing
 Ethnosemantics / Ethnoscience
 Ethnomethodology and conversation analysis
 Discourse Analysis
 Philology
In combination, these methods can produce thick descriptions, including observations
both ‘etic’ (that which can be described quantitatively) and ‘emic’ (that which we
qualify) and turn into ‘social facts’ (Erickson 1977). The question of ethics also comes
into play. To be secretly conducting ethnography of a community without their
knowledge and consent is not only unethical, but also deprives you of a chance to share
you findings in a meaningful way with the community itself.
And what of the ethnographer herself in this process? What role do we play as we
observe, scribbling in notebooks or typing away on our laptops?
as “subjecting yourself,
your own body and your own personality, and your own social situation, to the set
of contingencies that play upon a set of individuals, so that you can physically and
ecologically penetrate their circle of response to their social situation. So that you
are close to them while they are responding to what life does to them.”
Goffman describes the ethnographic collection of data
As best we can, our role is to participate enough to ‘feel’ while doing as little as
possible to influence the norms of the community and remaining forthright about
our scholarly intentions. This balancing act is difficult, but ultimately very
rewarding. Linguist Anna Trester reminds us to be vigilant for “a-ha” moments,
where things which may have seemed illusive or confusing suddenly click, revealing
their importance to the community. Often, it is discomfort or awkwardness that
can signal that signal you are on the brink of an a-ha moment. As Koonig and Ooi
explain, awkward moments “hint at our own personal emotional agenda in the
field and reveal our weaknesses in controlling the field situation” (2010).
3
L I N G U I S T I C S
I N
L A W
S C H O O L
Other times our communities of study may not seem so
strange or awkward. This, too, presents challenges for
the ethnographer. Erickson recalls Malinowski’s goal to
It can take a while to “tune your body” to
note the “imponderabilia of actual life and everyday
observing. At first you may feel like a
behavior.” When working in a community that
professional creeper! Embrace
resembles our own, the impoderabilia is inherently masked
uncomfortable moments as those with the
by its very familiarity. When observing communities
greatest potential to reveal frame
through a wider lens, it becomes even more important to
be aware of what preconceptions we may have about
mismatches. And above all remember: this
who these people are, what they do, and why or how
is for science.
they do it. In order to remove yourself from as many of
these assumptions as possible, there is a “playful”
process of making strange, as Duranti calls it, that which seems common, normal,
or obvious: “changing the familiar into the strange and vice versa, the strange into
the familiar” (1982). With this tabula rasa mindset, we can also come close to
approximating the experience of a first year students entering law school: they may
think they know, but chances are, they have no idea.
It’s time now, for the first day of law school.
Setting the Precedent: Literature Review
for studying discourse and
interaction. Erickson’s “Some Approaches to Inquiry in School-Community
Ethnography” (1977) is an excellent introduction to using schools as communities
of observation. As we will see later in this outline, storytelling is an important
element of many communities, and the law school is no exception. Wallace
Chafe’s “Discourse, Consciousness, and Time”, especially Ch. 18 Representing
Other Speech and Thought in First-Person Fiction with Displaced Immediacy”
explore how people use language to expand their range of information “beyond
their own immediate experiences, using referred-to speech, direct speech, indirect
speech, and verbatim indirect speech” (237).
Linguists recognize the classroom as a rich field
4
L I N G U I S T I C S
I N
L A W
S C H O O L
have focused on student-teacher interaction.
Although the majority have looked at elementary school settings or the English as
a Second Language classroom (Csomay 2007), the number of studies examining
the language of classroom interaction in higher education is growing. The
traditional linguistic framework of Conversation Analysis takes a magnifying glass
to transcripts of interactional data in order to see “how competent members of a
given society routinely carry out and make accountable their everyday actions”
(Heritage and Atkinson 1984, Sarangi and Roberts 1999). Richard West and Judy
Pearson, for example, investigated questioning in their study “Antecedent and
Consequent Conditions of Student Questioning: An Analysis of Classroom
Discourse” (1994). Using CA, they investigated student and teacher questioning
patterns, as it related to two primary research questions: 1) “what types of
questions do students ask in classrooms?” and 2) “what antecedent and
consequent conditions exist when students ask a question?” Camilla Vasques, for
her part, has looked at questioning in university discourse as it relates to
formulations, specifically the distributions, functions, and responses to two types
of explicit formulations (“what you’re saying is” and “are you saying that”) in
university discourse, as an indicator of how those formulations “indicate that in
higher education — just as in therapeutic contexts — the production of
formulations is highly constrained by participants’ institutional roles and their
relative power” (2010). Other studies have looked at stance (Biber 2006) and
variation (Csomay 2007) in higher education classrooms.
The wide use of CA in analyzing higher education classrooms likely comes
from the increasing amount of workable data available to researchers. Indeed,
most of the CA-based empirical studies, the most popular data source was the
large corpora of university recordings that make up the Michigan and TOEFL
databases. The MICASE corpus is a “free, publicly
available, online corpus comprised of 152
transcripts and nearly two million words” which
includes a range of both speech activity types and
disciplines, as well as some demographic
information about speakers (Vasques 2010). The
existence of this corpus makes transcriptions, along
with information about the participants, readily
available and therefore more studies can take place.
In addition, data on law school interaction is
completely missing from the MICASE corpus. But
even if it were, listening to tapes only would not be
considered ethnographic, because the community is
not directly observed.
Other sociolinguistic studies
Running parallel to the discourse on education is linguistic research
on the legal institution. Typical subjects of study include interrogations, on-the-
stand lawyer/witness questioning, and jury deliberations. While legal discourse has
largely been addressed by the field of forensic linguistics, often through the
5
L I N G U I S T I C S
I N
L A W
S C H O O L
framework of conversation analysis, another gap exists to connect legal discourses
to educational discourses. The communicative practices of a law school will
necessarily bear striking similarities to those of other upper level academic settings,
in so much the goal is preparation to advance afterwards to a specific trade.
is the work of Elizabeth Mertz, who has written
extensively on discourse in U.S. law schools, specifically the relationship between
linguistic ideology and praxis of law school (2010). Wide in its breadth, examining
data from eight different law schools in the United States, Mertz endeavors to
tackle the question of ‘the language of law school’ as a whole, from multiple
perspectives including linguistic ideology, epistemology and teaching style, and
identity within the social context of legal discourse. Using observation in law
school settings as well as classroom recordings, her work covers many topics of
interest to ethnographers. Her work does,
however, plainly build an argument towards
elements of law school language and
cultural structure that she feels should be
changed in order to improve the educational
value of the experience. This stance is not
one that we would find in pure
ethnography, where we avoid seeking to
change the structure of the community:
rather to describe it fully. Additionally, her
studies could benefit from other studies to
look more deeply at how law school
discourse is institutional, different from
other university communities, and how elements of its discourse relate to
Levinson’s participant orientations, including goal orientations, particular
constraints, and inferential frameworks (Heritage and Drew 1992).
The exception here
In short, there is still much to be investigated regarding the interplay of
talk and text in creating an institution that is clearly distinct from other higher
educational settings, walking a line between academics and a trade-school, where
the unspoken assumption is that the language used in the classroom will result in a
law student graduating into an attorney, and joining the intuition of law
afterwards. Having observed two 1st year law student classes, I hope to show how
questioning in these classes reflects and constructs its own institution that draws
from both the institution of law and the institution of education, yet remains
distinct in its own way.
6
L I N G U I S T I C S
NOW THAT
WE’VE
DONE OUR
RESEARCH,
IT’S TIME
TO STEP
OUT OF
THE
LIBRARY
AND
CHECK
OUT THE
REST OF
CAMPUS.
I N
L A W
S C H O O L
Welcome to the Georgetown University Law
Center
One of the best law schools in the country, Georgetown Law is part of the
Georgetown University system located in the nation’s capital, Washington, D.C. The
ranking system, I would be told again and again, is extremely important to the law
school’s identity—top-tier schools attract the brightest students, the most money, the
best professors. It is the second largest law school in the country, graduating about 500
law students every year. As a 1L, or first year law student, you follow the same
curriculum as most other law students around the country, and the same foundational
cases. A last name like Miranda or Daubert becomes inextricably intertwined with an
entire set of laws, cases, precedents and courts. But your education isn’t entirely based
on what you read. The interactions you have in the classroom become crucial to
learning the sociolinguistic competencies you’ll need to succeed both in school and
after.
Given the current dearth of studies involving law school interaction, which
is to say, its relative dearth, Scollon’s ‘so what?’ question comes to mind – why
should we undertake a study of the communicative and cultural practices of
law schools? According to the Washington Monthly, some 45,000 people
graduate from law school every year. Multiplied annually, from a numbers
perspective, that is no small group. Furthermore, because law students ostensibly
graduate and go on to practice law, these students become the people who will
defend or persecute us. They help us craft our wills, our small business contracts,
our divorce proceedings. They proceed over our trials and write our legislation. In
other words, the education of these students can have a direct effect on us as
individuals and society at large.
Choosing the GULC as my community of linguistic study was a relatively easy choice,
due to the important element of access. I am a full-time staff member at the law
school, and have worked there for almost two years. This gives me a familiarity with
the buildings, the schedules and the professors who make up the GULC campus. I am
not, however, a law student. As we will discuss later in the outline, there were limits on
7
L I N G U I S T I C S
I N
L A W
S C H O O L
how ‘participatory’ I could be. Walking a fine line between insider and outsider in the
community also had its benefits. First, from an ethical standpoint, I was able to get
permission from each of four professors—and was even requested by one to attend
and participate based on his knowledge of my role as linguistic ethnographer. I already
had a few student acquaintances at the school, whom I could turn to as informants
during my observations. They were more than happy to answer my questions and be
interviewed about the “law school experience.” Indeed—some of them acted as if they
were just waiting to be asked.
On the Record: Looking at Field Notes
During my ethnography of the law school, I attempted to get as close to participant
observation as possible, within practical limits. I could not, for example, become a law
student, sit for exams, write papers, or be called on during classes. In this way, my
observation was removed from many of the actual emotional and cultural experiences
of most law students. While taking field notes, I made an effort to do a sort of
braindump of everything that I saw, whether or not it struck me as odd. As a student
of higher education myself, there were many elements of the classroom setting that
seemed quite normal, and I might have risked not noticing something meaningful
because it seemed too banal to note.
The data are field notes from weekly, hour long observations of classroom
lectures as well as more spontaneous observations of student interaction in public
areas including hallways, the library, and study lounges. I also conducted several
short interviews with several law students and professors, primarily asking their
thoughts on law school education in general. Using primarily my notebook
computer, I was able to take field notes in real time during my observation. The
fact that almost all of the students I observed at the GULC had laptops eliminated
any awkwardness that this recording method might bring to another observational
setting.
The classes I observed were taught by four different professors, whose teaching
experience at the university ranged from one semester to 20 years. In order to
impose some level of consistency of topic from which to observe variation, I sat in
on two Criminal Law classes as three Torts courses. The Torts course is obligatory
for all first year law students at the GULC. First year classes also had the benefit
of allowing me to observe any changes in behaviors and routines as the first
semester progressed; changes which might indicate how the students were tuning
their speech and behavior to this new environment. The Torts class
Cold calling occurs in
classroom lectures when should stand as a ‘standard’ example of classroom interaction and a
reliable source for examples of ‘first year’ socialization and pedagogy.
a student is chosen—

without volunteering—to
answer a series of
questions posed by the
professor.
All classes are recorded by the audio-visual department at the Law
School. In addition to the official recording, I also did my own
8
L I N G U I S T I C S
I N
L A W
S C H O O L
recording in order to pick up the voices of students and professors as well as
possible. This also freed me to spend more time when taking field notes writing
descriptions of non-verbal communication and behaviors, knowing that if I
needed to go back and listen to the words again, I could.
The only good is
knowledge. Well,
knowledge and getting
a method of inquiry
named after you.
The class format was typically of most first year classes, in so much as it was
structured to accommodate a large number of students (approximately 60) and
used the Socratic method—by which students are “engaged in an is a form of
inquiry and debate between individuals with opposing viewpoints based on asking
and answering questions to stimulate critical thinking and to illuminate ideas.” All
classes that are automatically recorded by the University’s audio-visual department
are available to students who may have had to miss class, or would like access to
the lecture for studying purposes. The benefit of this, from a linguists’ perspective,
is that the law students are already aware of and presumably at ease with being
recorded so we can be guaranteed data that is more resistant to the ‘observer’s
paradox’, where it is feared that people speak differently than normal when they
know they are being observed.
Students are “engaged in a form of inquiry and debate… based on
asking and answering questions to stimulate critical thinking and to
illuminate ideas” known as the Socratic Method.
A professor cold calls on a student and proceeds to drill them about the
facts of the case for what can seem like an uncomfortably long time. This
process made me feel uncomfortable as an observer, and illustrated
differences in how I conceive higher education (where everyone shares
ideas, more-or-less voluntarily, and maintaining students’ esteem) and how
differently this is conceived by law school. Law students learn to prepare for the
possibility of this face threatening act, where the professor puts them in this1
position, by calling on them without asking whether they would like to participate,
where their self-esteem could lowered in a public sphere if they answered
incorrectly. Certainly not all students find this method of cold calling, cramming,
and being put on the spot at any given time to be the best educational system. In
my interviews with students, several reported frustration and a desire to quit, that
eventually faded into resignation with finishing school. Others, of course, adapt to
this system as ‘a new normal’ with less trouble.
Through observation, my research questions came into focus:
 What characterizes the speech of the law school community?
 What makes law school professor talk different from other “teacher talk”?
 And how does classroom discourse prepare students for a legal profession?
9
L I N G U I S T I C S
I N
L A W
S C H O O L
During one observation period, rather than attempting to write down
everything as I observed, I focused my field notes on a quantitative notetaking.
For this exercise, a unit was chosen to be counted. By looking at these
frequencies, we can determine how common a certain linguistic practice or pattern
or phenomenon is within the community. The more often a certain device is used,
the more it can be thought to play a role in the communication system of the
community. Frequency is not set in stone, however: what is considered ‘frequent’
can depend on the length of the observation, and how marked the unit is. It is
important to remember that low frequency counts can be revealing too—if no one
ever uses certain utterances, there are new questions raised of what language is
considered taboo.



For my counted unit, I selected narratives of hypothetical situations. This
narrative was motivated partly as a result of earlier discourse analysis of transcripts
of the lectures, in which the interplay between pronoun use by lecturing
professors and positioning of students as lay or institutional participants within
the story was examined. Having used a closer linguistic (CA) approach with that
data, I was curious to see what how these hypothetical situations could be
interpreted from an ethnographic lens—which would allow me to factor in
observation, reaction, prosody and context.
A Guy Walks into the American Bar Association
. In one professor’s class, I noticed that the shifts between first person (I, we)
and second person (you) occurred most frequently when professor was proposing
hypothetical situations: placing the students in the role of either a lay or
professional member of the legal community.
Professor :
Okay. So. By statute you’re allowed to sue people after you
die or after – you the plaintiff die or after you the defendant
dies… Why would you pass a statute allowing these lawsuits?
Yeah?
Student:
It serves a deterrent.
Professor:
Does it?
Student:
Professor:
[pause] Yes.
Okay, I got the defendant. I don’t want him to do this again.
But guess what. He’s NOT gonna do it again. Guess why.
Becau::se he’s dead.
Within the first sentence utterance, the professor has positioned his students in
one of two ways within the legal system: either as a plaintiff or a defendant in a
10
L I N G U I S T I C S
I N
L A W
S C H O O L
hypothetical situation where, in fact, they have died. He also asks of the class ‘why
would you pass a statute allowing these lawsuits?’ implying they are the ones
engaged in legislating the law. From an institutional discourse perspective, we
could consider the plaintiff/client roles as lay roles, much like a patient in a
medical setting or a client in a business setting. At the same time, he also asks of
the class why ‘you’ would want to pass a certain law. Here he is describing
engagement in the professional role of lawmaker, and still focusing on the role of
the student. Notice he did not ask, “why would [lawyers/legislators/they] want to
pass this legislation?” Instead those present during the lecture are ‘cast’ through
use of pronouns. Whereas 2nd person ‘you’ was used in his original hypothetical
situation to describe the students as either a plaintiff or defendant, in his final
utterance, he switches to using first person ‘I’ positioning himself in the story as
well.
Professor:
So for example if you decide you want to disinherit your spouse, we
just won’t let you do that. Your spouse is gonna get SOME money.
That’s that might be true of your children as well-meaning you would
continue to be an heir at law. ‘Cause you would be entitled to some
statutory distribution even if the decedent makes an effort to
disinherit you.
Here again, we see students positioned in the story. While one could argue that
‘you’ here doesn’t not actually apply to the students, and is instead a general ‘you’ ,
it is still a linguistic choice made instead of other possibilities: ‘if one decides
to disinherit one’s spouse’ or ‘if a person decides.’ In the hypothetical situation, a
short narrative is being told, and rather than simply describing the situation of ‘a
person’ the professors use the 1st and 2nd person pronouns, animating the students:
Professor:
I am on the Supreme Court, this may be dubious, but good news! I
also have a big budget so I have hired 34 clerks.
Here, too, the professor proposes a hypothetical situation where both he and his
students are actually participating in the storyline. He hedges a bit (‘this may be
dubious!’) regarding the probability of his narrative, but
presses on with the storyline. In these hypothetical situations,
In these hypothetical situations, a story world
a story world (Chafe) was created where the students
was created where the students themselves
themselves played a role.
played a role.
In the majority of these situations, the story was presented as
fact, using the present tense, and epistemically, the professor, in the role of storyteller,
often knew not only the facts of the case, but also the characters’ thoughts:
Professor:
So there’s a two car crash, both people have been injured. The
plaintiff has now been killed. The defendant is now clinging to life.
You know, like under Martin circumstances, where with a really
11
L I N G U I S T I C S
I N
L A W
S C H O O L
horrible life with really horrible life with really serious injuries. And the
defendant’s thinking ‘I can struggle here to live or I can in fact just kill
myself so that I avoid liability, my family gets to recover my assets, I
think I’ll just kill myself or at least ya know not take the drugs that
they want to give me.’
In this example, the hypothetical situation is still presented as fact in present tense,
but the students nor the
professor play a role in the
story. They do, however, have
access to the thoughts of the
characters in the story,
although they are not firstperson narratives (Chafe).
At times this story world was
presented so realistically that
students actually had to clarify
whether the facts being stated were real to the case being studied, or hypothetical.
Other times, the professor himself would clarify:
Professor:
In real life, don’t we think if you kill someone you oughta have to
compensate them for that anguish that they feel now even though
they would have felt it later when the loved one ultimately died?
This professor used the expression ‘in real life’ five different times in the course
of just one of my observations. Again, the ethnographer asks, why would he need
to use this phrase at all? In order to distinguish the current reality from the story
world he constructs through narrative during lecture, where almost anything is
possible.
There is still an element of stylistic choice.
Not all professors use these
hypothetical situations as frequently as the others. In one Professor’s class, I
counted five times when he began telling a story that involved a future or
hypothetical situation that the students played a role in. This number was fewer
than I was expecting, after hearing far more in other Torts classes. The importance
of counting is highlighted here—sometimes what we think we’re observing,
(whether due to past experience or expectations) may not be the case!
In addition to stylistics, performance also varied
between professors. There were some interesting things
to note in Professor Super’s use of hypothetical
situations. He would change the tone and prosody of his
voice, in often comical ways, when he using reported
speech within the story. Other times, such as in the example above when he was
Sometimes what we think we’re observing,
whether due to past experience or
expectations, may not be the case!
12
L I N G U I S T I C S
I N
L A W
S C H O O L
speaking as a Supreme Court justice, he would use a very low, booming voice,
perhaps in order to convey an idea of power.
As the semester progressed,
the students became more likely to adopt this
method of story creation through hypotheticals. They would stop answering
questions with ‘the lawyer would do x’ and enter into the story world:
Student:
I think they still have to consider that they would—you would have to
pay for the non-pecuniary damages to the person up until the point
that that person was around. Like, you still factor that in that there
would be other people affected by the injury that you’re inflicting now
on this person.
Here we see a repair—where a student corrects herself mid-sentence—and instead
of using 3rd personal plural ‘they’, she adopts the teacher’s style of 2nd person ‘you’.
This carried over into the law school discourse, even outside of the classroom.
During my observation of a study lounge, I observed collaboration between two
students tasked with drawing up a mock contract:
Student 1:
I would negotiate for change.
Student 2:
The buyer would negotiate for X and then I would reject and
negotiate for Y. That’s favorable to us.
In the dialogue above, the students, outside the classroom, are discussing what
they would do in a hypothetical situation. Although this is not a story told during
the lecture, they are still appropriating a professional voice:
in an imagined future context, they are making decisions
“If a story is not about the hearer, he will
within the legal institution, as opposed to saying what a
lawyer would do, and excluding themselves from that
not listen.” – East of Eden
institution.
Hypothetically Speaking
As I continued to research the methods used by GULC professors to ‘cast’
themselves and their students as members of the legal institutional setting, I
excitedly told a fellow linguist, who happened to hold a law degree as well, about
my findings. I described to her that professors would launch into stories, told in
present tense, but which the students were expected to understand were irrealis,
modality which conveys that the stated proposition is nonactual or nonfactual
(Noonan 1985), or hypothetically possible.
“Oh, yeah. Hypos.” she replied.
“Hypos?” I gulped.
13
L I N G U I S T I C S
I N
L A W
S C H O O L
“Hypothetical situations. We abbreviate it so we don’t have to say
‘hypotheticals’ all the time.”
I thought I had secretly uncovered,
illustrated an extremely important point: as ethnographers we cannot assume that
our communities of study are unaware of their own practices, linguistic or cultural.
As Charlotte Linde notes, sometimes what your informants tell you—or could
have told you—in the beginning of the study about what is important and
meaningful in their community will prove to be true in the end of countless hours
of field work, observation, and analysis. The value in of ethnographic study,
therefore, is not always to dig up a hidden treasure buried below the
consciousness, but instead to gather actual data to quantify and qualify its
existence.
Her awareness of the unit of analysis
And what could be the point of using these hypothetical situations in the law
school discourse? Answering this kind of question may be more suited to
discourse
analysis,
but
taking
into
consideration the context of the law school
process, we can begin to make some
evaluations. Law students are only in school
for three years, but the socialization they
undergo is expected be enough to get them
going in their careers and carry them through
their cases. Words have to fulfill the role that
experience cannot.
Review Session
In this outline, we have covered the most important elements of ethnography
of communication. These include the goals and role of the participant observer herself,
how to choose a community of study, and how to conduct field work. We also
examined previous literature on linguistics in both the educational and legal contexts,
pointing out how ethnography of law school fills a gap in the literature from both a
methodological and topical standpoint. Finally, we looked for meaningful patterns in
the fieldwork, drawing from our linguistic training to make connections between
speech and culture. Next, we will look more deeply at what analysis can be gleaned
from the transcriptions of linguistic data. As we move on from process into the realm of
product, consider the following questions:
1.
Where do these ‘constructed futures’ emerge in the data?
2.
Why is the professor making up hypothetical situations instead of simply
referencing historic cases?
3.
How does this language allow students and professors to share a culture?
14
L I N G U I S T I C S
I N
A
L A W
S C H O O L
P
access, 7
Participant Observation, 3
performance, 12
professional, 1, 4, 10, 11, 13
pronoun, 10
C
communicative competence, 1
R
E
recording, 8, 9
ethnography, 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 8, 14
S
G
socialization, 8, 14
sociolinguistic, 5, 7
Socratic Method, 9
speech community, 1
story world, 11, 12, 13
Georgetown, i, 7
L
lay, 10, 11
legalese, 1
T
thick description, 2
Torts, 8, 12
M
making strange, 4
15
L I N G U I S T I C S
I N
L A W
S C H O O L
Works cited:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
Biber, D. 2006. Stance in spoken and written university registers. Journal of English for Academic Purposes
5.97-116.
Chafe, Wallace. 1994. Discourse, consciousness, and time: the flow and displacement of conscious experience in
speaking and writing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Copenhagen Business School. CBS, Koning, Juliette, and Ooi, Can-Seng. 2010. Awkwardness and what to do
with it. Center for International Business and Emerging Markets. http://hdl.handle.net/10398/8060.
Csomay, Eniko. 2007. "A Corpus-Based Look at Linguistic Variation in Classroom Interaction: Teacher Talk
versus Student Talk in American University Classes". Journal of English for Academic Purposes. 6 (4): 336-355.
Duff, Patricia. “Language Socialization into Academic Discourse Communities.” Annual Review of Applied
Linguistics (2010), 30, 169–192. Web.
Duranti, Alessandro. 1997. Ethnography. Linguistic Anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Erickson, Frederick. 1977. "Some Approaches to Inquiry in School-Community Ethnography". Anthropology
&Amp; Education Quarterly. 8 (2): 58-69.
Goffman, Erving. 1989. On Fieldwork. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography: 18 (2) pp 123- 132.
Gumperz, John. 1997 [1981]. Communicative Competence. In: Nicholas Coupland and Adam Jaworski.
Sociolinguistics: A Reader. St. Martin’s Press, 39-49.
Gumperz, John and Dell Hymes (Eds.) 1972. Directions in Sociolinguistics: The ethnography of
Communication. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
Hobbs, Pamela. ““You must say it for him’: Reformulating a witness’ testimony on cross-examination at trial.”
Interdisciplinary Journal for the Study of Discourse Volume 23, Issue 4, Pages 477–511, ISSN (Online) 16134117, ISSN (Print) 0165-4888, DOI: 10.1515/text.2003.019, 18/11/2003
Hymes, Dell. 1972. Models of the interaction of language and social life. Directions in Sociolinguistics; the ethnography of
communication. John Gumperz and Dell Hymes Eds. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. pp 35-71.
Linde, Charlotte. Working the Past: Narrative and Institutional Memory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.
Luzer, Daniel. "Too Many Law Schools?" Washington Monthly 08 Jan. 2010. Accessed: 08 Nov. 2011
<http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/college_guide/blog/too_many_law_schools.php/>.
Maley, Yvonne D. The Language of Legislation. Macquarie University: Thesis (M.A. Hons.), 1979.
Mertz, Elizabeth. 2007. The language of law school learning to "think like a lawyer". Oxford [u.a.]: Oxford Univ.
Press.
Noonan, Michael. 1985. "Complementation." In Shopen 1985c 42–140.
Saville-Troike, Muriel. 2003. The ethnography of communication: an introduction. Malden, Mass: Blackwell
(3rd Edition).
Scollon, Ron. 1985. The Machine Stops: Silence in the metaphor of Malfunction. In: Deborah Tannen and Muriel
Saville-Troike (eds.) Perspectives on Silence. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
Scollon, Ron and Suzanne Wong-Scollon. 2003. Discourses in Place: Language in the Material World. London
/ New York: Routledge.
Vasquez C. 2010. "Examining two explicit formulations in university discourse". Text and Talk. 30 (6): 749-771.
Watson, T. J. 2011. Ethnography, Reality, and Truth: The Vital Need for Studies of ‘How Things Work’ in
Organizations and Management. Journal of Management Studies, 48: 202–217.
West, Richard, and Judy C. Pearson. 1994. "Antecedent and Consequent Conditions of Student Questioning: An
Analysis of Classroom Discourse across the University".Communication Education. 43 (4): 299-311.
16