‘It was him’: Representational strategies, identity, and legitimization in the Boston Marathon bombing trial narratives

Abstract

Adopting a systemic functional linguistic view of language as a system of options from which language users choose to construct meaning, this study seeks to critically explicate the constitutive roles of reference terms and event description in accomplishing character positioning in the opening event of a recent high-profile capital trial, the Boston Marathon bombing trial of 2015. Incorporating Halliday’s concept of transitivity and Van Leeuwen’s inventory of social actors, the quantitative and qualitative analysis reveals that the prosecution and defence differ starkly in representational practice and that both reference terms and event description are prime stylistic devices that synergistically serve not only to construct and ascribe polarized identities to characters in their narratives but also to (de-)humanize the defendant before the verdict is reached, thereby (de-)legitimizing blame and responsibility and potentially influencing the jury’s decisions.