Lectures

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The 2013 Bro Andrew B. Gonzalez, FSC   Distinguished Professorial Chair Lecture i n  Linguistics and Language Education

• Saturday, 2 March 2013, at 10:00 am 
• European Documentation Centre, 13th floor, Henry Sy Bldg, 
• De La Salle University-Manila

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BIONOTE

     Marilu Rañosa-Madrunio is Full Professor at the Department of English of the University of Santo Tomas and, until last year, was Chair of the Department. Previous to that, she was Chair of the Department of Languages. She received her PhD in Applied Linguistics from De La Salle University-Manila in 2003. In 2010, she became the first Filipino recipient of the EFL Foreign Educators Program at Georgetown University through the auspices of the US Department of State.  Last year, she attended the International Summer School in Forensic Linguistic Analysis (ISSFLA) in Malaysia which aroused her interest in Forensic Linguistics (FL). Other than FL, her research interests include world Englishes, intercultural rhetoric, sociolinguistics, and second language writing.

     She has been a member of the Technical Committee for English of the Philippine Commission on Higher Education (CHED) since 2007.

Language, Power, and Control in Philippine Courtroom Discourse by Dr. Marilu Rañosa-Madrunio  2013 Chair Holder

ABSTRACT

     In the legal setting, language and power are played out in the courtroom. As is often the case, power is wielded by the interrogators or the “powerful” who control the public discourse, thus putting the interrogated, or the “powerless,” at a disadvantage. The question of power in the courtroom remains to be controversial especially that it beleaguers the lay people. The situation becomes even more serious when societies are multilingual, such as when the language of the court is English and it is not conveniently absorbed by the disadvantaged lay.

     This presentation investigates how language and power are enacted and legitimated in the Philippine courtroom specifically in the discourse genre of direct and cross-examinations. Using critical discourse analysis as framework, it analyzes the questioning process carried out in the courtroom, sentence structures, turn-taking system, silence, lexical, syntactic and prosodic features, speech acts, face-threatening and face-saving acts, politeness, and the multi-modal conduct of the courtroom players.  In the end, I hope to show that power asymmetry between lawyers and witnesses lead to social consequences and problems.

     Selected courtroom proceedings which served as corpus of the study were taken from Regional Trial Court (RTC) 80 in Malolos City, which is classified as a Special Court for Drug Cases in Bulacan. Out of the several municipal and regional trial courts in Guiguinto and Malolos involved in a pilot project conducted by the Committee on Linguistic Concerns of the Supreme Court of the Philippines in 2008 which directed the use of Filipino in court proceedings, only RTC 80 pursued the project for at least five years, until the untimely demise last year of its presiding judge, Judge Ma. Resurreccion Buhat. Since 2012, the court has reverted back to the use of English in the conduct of its proceedings.

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