Domestic discord, rocky relationships: semantic prosodies in representations of marital violence in the O.J. Simpson trial

K E Y W O R D S : corpus linguistics, courtroom discourse, domestic violence, forensic linguistics, O.J. Simpson, semantic prosody 1. Corpus linguistics, connotation and semantic prosody Collocation, ‘the company a word keeps’ to use Firth’s (1957) definition, can tell us a great deal about the semantic shape of a word or phrase, and one particular collocational characteristic, semantic prosody, provides the specific focus for this article. Stubbs (1996: 172) describes semantic prosody as revealing ‘words [which] occur in characteristic collocations, showing the associations and connotations they have and therefore the assumptions which they embody’. His definition makes a useful distinction between semantic prosodies and collocations; for Stubbs, the semantic prosody of a word is manifested as a pattern of collocations which may be most usefully elucidated by reference to corpora of language use in context rather than at a more intuitive and impressionistic level, a view supported by Louw (1993), who also advocates the use of corpora as a way of exploring systematic patterning in semantic profiles. A RT I C L E 291 Domestic discord, rocky relationships: semantic prosodies in representations of marital violence in the O.J. Simpson trial J A N E T C O T T E R I L L C A R D I F F U N I V E R S I T Y Discourse & Society Copyright © 2001 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) Vol 12(3): 291–312 [0957-9265 (200105) 12:3; 291–312; 016629] This article draws on the work of Sinclair (1987, 1991) and later Louw (1993) in exploring the kinds of prosodic orientation which are attached to particular lexical choices. Sinclair (1987: 155–6) observes for example, that the verb happen is typically associated with unpleasant things such as accidents, and that similarly, set in appears to collocate frequently with negative events and states, such as ‘the rain set in’ and ‘problems set in’. Later work by Stubbs (1995a, b) has also highlighted a similar tendency towards negative semantic prosody of collocates in the use of the verb cause. In seeking to describe the semantic prosodies of words, a resource such as a corpus is invaluable since it permits large-scale searches for patterns of word behaviour. A number of researchers in Birmingham have exploited this type of resource to conduct studies in precisely this way, often with a critical linguistic orientation to their work. Krishnamurthy’s (1996) study, for example, used corpus collocations to bring out racism in the contexts of use of the words ethnic, racial and tribal respectively; Caldas-Coulthard and Moon (1999) examined collocations of words relating to age and beauty and their gender-differential usage in newspaper reports to illuminate gender marginalization. Most recently, Hunston (1999) has explored the asymmetry of the words deaf and hearing, suggesting a ‘prosody of disadvantage and suffering’ in the use of deaf (Hunston, 1999: 10). This article aims to build on this critical linguistic tradition by using the corpus to explore the semantic prosodies of references to domestic violence in the O.J. Simpson criminal trial. The lexical items selected for analytical attention are not the more obvious representations of Simpson as a wife beater, batterer or abuser, although the prosecution argument contains copious examples of these powerfully negatively-oriented formulations. Rather, the article takes some of the more subtle terms used by the prosecution to construct an image of Simpson as a violent man capable of murdering his wife. The final section of the article deals with the defence response to this presentation of Simpson, and examines some of their attempts to minimize and neutralize the negative prosodies evoked by the prosecution. As an initial step in this analysis, I will first explore the role of lexis in constructing and reconstructing reality in the courtroom. 2. Reconstructing reality in court through lexical choice The principal role played by jurors is the adjudication of the plausibility of two (or potentially more) versions of events. Jurors in a criminal trial context are charged not with finding the truth in the midst of falsehood, but rather they are asked to decide the common-sense likelihood of one story being more convincing than another. In order to carry out the socially significant task of legal adjudication, jury members are predominantly reliant upon the testimony of witnesses and the spin put on that testimony by prosecution and defence attorneys respectively. The evidence presented often comes down to selective recall of events by both sides, 292 Discourse & Society 12(3)