(Re) Construction of linguistic agency in the confirmation hearing of the Kenyan case one at the International Criminal Court

Abstract

This study seeks to examine how the professional and the lay court interactants employed language to construct different versions of ̳who did what to whom‘ during the Confirmation Hearing of the ICC-Kenya Case One to represent the events of the 2007/2008 post-election violence differently. The study‘s specific objectives were: 1) to examine how the Prosecution and the Defence lawyers employed transitivity structures and address terms to construct agency at the trial; 2) to evaluate how the lawyers used agent deletion strategies, collective nouns and nouns denoting groups of people as well as nominalization to background agency at the trial; and 3) to examine how the suspects used the first person pronouns, nouns denoting kinship and deictics to distance themselves from criminal liability at the trial. Using a qualitative case study design, the study took a critical discourse analysis approach adopting document examination as the main method of data collection and analysis, to collect and analyze the data within Leeuwen‘s Representation of Social Actors framework. The study found that the Prosecution lawyers on the one hand, consistently and explicitly made specific reference to the three suspects using proper nouns and coded them as Doers in material processes, Carriers in relational processes and Sensers in mental processes as a way of foregrounding agency. On the other hand, the Prosecution lawyers used collective nouns and nouns denoting groups of people to generally refer to other individuals in the PEV discourses as a way of backgrounding agency. With regard to the Defence teams, the study found that they coded the suspects as being on the receiving end of the PEV using transitivity structures as well as expressions with positive connotations, and coded the PEV activities as self-engendered by omitting human agents in their utterances. The Defence teams also phrased actions related to the process of the investigations as nominals facilitating the restructuring of the actions in terms of abstractions. The study found these as strategies of fronting a positive perception of the suspects while backgrounding a criminal one. Finally, the study found that the first and the third suspects employed the first person pronoun and nouns denoting kinship relations to represent themselves favourably to the court as a means of backgrounding agency. This study therefore concludes that both professional and lay court interactants manipulate the happenings of a specific social practice in the courtroom through language to variedly construct agency and that, besides meeting the communicative needs of discourse participants, language is fundamental in the construction of agency. The study recommends further studies assessing the contribution of other linguistic mechanisms like questioning and question types in the construction of agency; and also recommends the use of the same transcripts/data to investigate other ways in which language was used during the hearing to depict other aspects such as power relations, identity construction, language as advantage/disadvantage among others.