engleski

Discursive Voices in Croatian 19th Century Legal Texts

The concepts of voice and register tend to overlap, but they are not equivalent. Bakhtin (1981, 1984) makes a distinction between social voices, which could be taken to correspond to social register, and individual voices characterising individual speakers. In the legal context, social, or enregistered voices are related to the genre characteristics of legal discourse, while individual voices could be taken as indexical of individuals taking part in the legal process, either as lay participants or as professionals. According to Agha (2005), every register has a social range and domain, performable through its use. Registers are social formations in the sense that some language users but not others are socialized in their use and construal. Anyone acquainted with a register can employ it in acts of strategic manipulation of roles and identities. Those who acquire a particular register are performing a kind of role alignment with its characteristic figures. In addition, the register is a form of semiotic capital that advances certain rights and privileges.The repertoires of a register can change, through analogical extension, “borrowing, ” changes in reference standards , changes in practices of codification, or the substitution of the language of one group by the language of another.(Ibid.) Records of court proceedings represent different voices, discourses and registers. An oral testimony, for example, includes an earlier speech event, which may be recorded in the form of direct or indirect speech. Sometimes it is not clear where one discourse level ends and another begins, and there may be imprecisions in switching between direct and indirect speech. Sometimes, a report of a speech event can be rendered as narrative report of speech acts. Different levels of discourse and modes of presentation make it difficult to discern whose language is reflected. Furthermore, the words of lay participants in court proceedings were written down by scribes, which poses the question of whose language was actually reflected. For its part, the scribal language should not be seen as that of an individual beyond his official role: many words and phrases are formulaic and genre-specific. (Kyto 2011) The paper will discuss the role of discursive voices and registers in Croatian 19th century legal texts, focusing on proceedings of Tabula Banalis, the highest court for Croatia and Slavonia at the time, in order to show the changing roles of sociohistorical practices involving register changes in the specific legal context within the multilingual Habsburg Empire.

legal discourse, voice, register, speech acts

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