In the final years of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first century, there has been a worldwide tendency to approach conflict resolution from a restorative rather than from a retributive perspective. The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, with its principle of ‘amnesty for truth’ was a turning point. Based on my discursive research of the TRC victim hearings, I would argue that it was on a discursive level in particular that the Truth Commission has exerted/is still exerting (...) a long-lasting impact on South African society. In this article, three of these features will be highlighted and illustrated: firstly, the TRC provided a discursive forum for thousands of ordinary citizens. Secondly, by means of testimonies from apartheid victims and perpetrators, the TRC composed an officially recognised archive of the apartheid past. Thirdly, the reconciliation discourse created at the TRC victim hearings formed a template for talking about a traumatic past, and it opened up the debate on reconciliation. By discussing these three features and their social impact, it will become clear that the way in which the apartheid past was remembered at the victim hearings seemed to have been determined, not so much by political concerns, but mainly by social needs. (shrink)

In this article Goffman's theories on participation framework and change in footing are applied to discursive material from the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The main finding is that a discursive setting such as the public hearings of a truth and reconciliation commission can be highly intricate and layered when considering the role of the various discourse participants. The testifying victims, the TRC commissioners and the audience engaged in various forms of subordinate communication — byplay, crossplay and sideplay — (...) in addition to the standardized and expected interaction between victims and commissioners. This tells us that face-to-face talk should not be regarded as the prototypical participation framework, even not in a highly stage-managed discursive setting. Moreover, by paying attention to the co-presence of also a `virtual' audience, the Goffmanian framework is taken beyond its confines of only discussing interaction between discourse participants who are physically present in a speech situation. In the end, each of the discourse participants tried to exploit the possibilities offered by this complex framework, thus adding to the impact the TRC had on South African society at large. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the development of witness examination as an argumentative dialogue between legal professionals and lay-people, considering in particular the case of Public Inquiries in Great Britain. This paper discusses the retention of traces of the adversarial system, typical of Common Law trials, in this type of inquisitorial proceedings, stressing on how counsels exploit some linguistic features to control both the form and the ideational content of the exchange as well as the power relationship with the witness. The (...) analysis is carried out on a corpus of 15 days of witness examination transcripts (507,346 words) collected from three different Public Inquiries, namely Bloody Sunday Inquiry (Northern Ireland), Shipman Inquiry (England), and Cullen Inquiry (Scotland), to achieve a wider perspective on Common Law administrative justice. The study is based on a discourse and genre analytic approach for the macro-analysis of Public Inquiries in the context of courtroom discourse and of witness examination as a genre that develops within this discourse framework. Subsequently, a micro-analysis of the linguistic features used by counsel in questions to argumentatively shape the content and the form of the exchange is provided. We also take into consideration the role of metadiscourse (textual and interpersonal), repetitions and reformulations. Preliminary results show that these linguistic features provide valuable evidence for the hypothesis that the adversarial side of the argumentative dialogue between legal professionals and lay-people during the witness examination of Public Inquiries is retained. (shrink)