The Role of Linguistic Impression Management: The Case of Hungarian Courtroom Discourses

Abstract

AbstractThis paper aims to present various linguistic strategies of impression management used by Hungarian judges, defendants and witnesses, taking into consideration the characteristics of Hungarian culture, language and legal system. In courtroom proceedings the way the participants construct an impression depends greatly on their institutional roles. Hungarian law belongs to the family of continental systems and the judge has an active role in the questioning. In contrary to the expansively investigated Anglo-American cross-examination where witnesses are questioned by the opposing parties, in Hungarian courtroom proceedings the judge is the first to ask questions from the witnesses and the defendants in an unbiased way. The judges are able to motivate the witnesses to cooperate with them by defending their positive impression construction. In addition, the witnesses can be placed in a more advantageous position as a result of an impression management strategy applied by the judges. The research is based on a corpus collected by the author. It consists of ten Hungarian trials recorded using a voice recorder. Based on the corpus, five types of linguistic impression management strategies were investigated: raising or conveying interest, emotional identification with another’s assertion or attitude, highlighting socially approved values, self-superiority and protection, as well as repair work. This research aims to demonstrate the key roles of linguistic impression management strategies in Hungarian courtroom questioning where the judge questions the participants unbiasedly.