Analyzing Strong and Weak Verbal Styles in Text Interpretation of Judge-Couples’ Defense Sessions in the Uncontested Divorce Casesof the Civil Courts

This research is an attempt to investigate verbal specialties in the interpretation of the judges and couples' speech for the reason of verification or disapproval of allegation. Hung and Bradac’s (1993) Verbal Style Model was employed and fifteen visual files of the couples’ defense sessions of the uncontested divorce cases in the civil courts of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The duration of each file was twenty minutes. After observing all the fifteen visual files carefully for finding out strong and weak verbal styles in their speech and then descriptive statistics was calculated. Findings revealed that the Judges and couples used particular communicative verbal styles including strong and weak elements leads to discoursal highlighting to increase the effect of their speech and showed themselves innocent. Through employing linguistic elements such as intensifiers, repetition, and incomplete sentences, they express their own ideas and try to decrease the load of their allegation and pretend that others are guilty. In the same special situation of a communicative procedure, they displayed different behaviors in the situational context .Investigating semantic and discoursal features leads to the speech better interpretation and the exploration of crimes. An expert witness with his professional performance and experience in the court is so significant for the spoken and written texts.

Keywords:

Courtroom Discourse Structure , Forensic Linguistics , Strong and Weak Style , Speech , The World Outside