Interrogative Forms as Professional Identity Markers in Legal Research Articles

This paper investigates the issue of professional identity in legal research articles by focussing on interactional discourse features like interrogative forms. The main concern of this analysis is to see whether and how forensic language influences academic discourse when it is authored by practitioners of the legal field or by people learning and teaching how to become courtroom experts. Forensic discourse (and particularly opening and closing monologues at trials) has been defined “not so much as a search for the truth [but] as an institutionalized search for answers” (Pascual 2006: 399-400, emphasis added); in this sense, the use of interrogative structures – for raising doubts or eliciting questions which are subsequently answered and resolved – is among the most typical features of legal reasoning and argumentation (cf. Water 1988). The purpose of this paper is to study such fictive interactional structures in legal academic discourse both in quantitative and qualitative terms.