法廷ディスコース分析

― コーパス言語学からのアプローチ

抄録

In recent years, research on legal discourse has been on the rise in the United States and United Kingdom. A new discipline, "forensic linguistics" was born and has developed as part of linguistic research. Although the work of forensic linguistics in early days was "usually undertaken as an intellectual challenge and almost always required the creation, rather than simply the application, of a method of analysis" (Coulthard 1994: 27), the advancement of computer technology since the 1990s and beyond has provided forensic linguists with a new analytical tool, known as corpus linguistics. This new discipline not only enables them to process a large volume of data but also provides them with a new method of analyzing those data. In this paper, I shall first overview the forensic text analysis conducted in the U.K., then, evaluate usefulness of corpus linguistics for courtroom discourse analysis and finally discuss its relevance to interpreter-mediated legal discourse in Japan.