Search results for ""Author Robin Conley Riner""

Confronting the Death Penalty: How Language Influences Jurors in Capital Cases probes how jurors make the ultimate decision about whether another human being should live or die. Drawing on ethnographic and qualitative linguistic methods, this book explores the means through which language helps to make death penalty decisions possible - how specific linguistic choices mediate and restrict jurors', attorneys', and judges' actions and experiences while serving and reflecting on capital trials. The analysis draws on fifteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in diverse counties across Texas, including participant observation in four capital trials and post-verdict interviews with the jurors who decided those cases. Given the impossibility of access to actual capital jury deliberations, this integration of methods aims to provide the clearest possible window into jurors' decision-making. Using methods from linguistic anthropology, conversation analysis, and multi-modal discourse analysis, Conley analyzes interviews, trial talk, and written legal language to reveal a variety of communicative practices through which jurors dehumanize defendants and thus judge them to be deserving of death. By focusing on how language can both facilitate and stymie empathic encounters, the book addresses a conflict inherent to death penalty trials: jurors literally face defendants during trial and then must distort, diminish, or negate these face-to-face interactions in order to sentence those same defendants to death. The book reveals that jurors cite legal ideologies of rational, dispassionate decision-making - conveyed in the form of authoritative legal language - when negotiating these moral conflicts. By investigating the interface between experiential and linguistic aspects of legal decision-making, the book breaks new ground in studies of law and language, language and psychology, and the death penalty.

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Provides an expansive view of the full field of linguistic anthropology, featuring an all-new team of contributing authors representing diverse new perspectives A New Companion to Linguistic Anthropology provides a timely and authoritative overview of the field of study that explores how language influences society and culture. Bringing together more than 30 original essays by an interdisciplinary panel of renowned scholars and younger researchers, this comprehensive volume covers a uniquely wide range of both classic and contemporary topics as well as cutting-edge research methods and emerging areas of investigation. Building upon the success of its predecessor, the acclaimed Blackwell Companion to Linguistic Anthropology, this new edition reflects current trends and developments in research and theory. Entirely new chapters discuss topics such as the relationship between language and experiential phenomena, the use of research data to address social justice, racist language and raciolinguistics, postcolonial discourse, and the challenges and opportunities presented by social media, migration, and global neoliberalism. Innovative new research analyzes racialized language in World of Warcraft, the ethics of public health discourse in South Africa, the construction of religious doubt among Orthodox Jewish bloggers, hybrid forms of sociality in videoconferencing, and more. Presents fresh discussions of topics such as American Indian speech communities, creolization, language mixing, language socialization, deaf communities, endangered languages, and language of the law Addresses recent trends in linguistic anthropological research, including visual documentation, ancient scribes, secrecy, language and racialization, global hip hop, justice and health, and language and experience Utilizes ethnographic illustration to explore topics in the field of linguistic anthropology Includes a new introduction written by the editors and an up-to-date bibliography with over 2,000 entries A New Companion to Linguistic Anthropologyis a must-have for researchers, scholars, and undergraduate and graduate students in linguistic anthropology, as well as an excellent text for those in related fields such as sociolinguistics, discourse studies, semiotics, sociology of language, communication studies, and language education.

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Is it "just words" when a lawyer cross-examines a rape victim in the hopes of getting her to admit an interest in her attacker? Is it "just words" when the Supreme Court hands down a decision or when business people draw up a contract? In tackling the question of how an abstract entity exerts concrete power, Just Words focuses on what has become the central issue in law and language research: what language reveals about the nature of legal power. John M. Conley, William M. O'Barr, and Robin Conley Riner show how the microdynamics of the legal process and the largest questions of justice can be fruitfully explored through the field of linguistics. Each chapter covers a language-based approach to a different area of the law, from the cross-examinations of victims and witnesses to the inequities of divorce mediation. Combining analysis of common legal events with a broad range of scholarship on language and law, Just Words seeks the reality of power in the everyday practice and application of the law. As the only study of its type, the book is the definitive treatment of the topic and will be welcomed by students and specialists alike. This third edition brings this essential text up to date with new chapters on nonverbal, or "multimodal," communication in legal settings and law, language, and race.

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