Losing Portia's Voice

The Metapragmatic Evaluations of "Quiet" and "Loud" Female Law Students in US Mock Trial Competitions

Datos Bibliográficos

ID2286293
AutoresJoon‐beom Chu (0000-0002-9080-9449, Jeonbuk National University)
Año2020
Volumen30
Número3
Páginas353-368
Fecha de publicación2020-12-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaJournal of Linguistic Anthropology (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 1055-1360 • E-ISSN: 1548-1395
EditorialWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/jola.12282
OpenAlexW3086344534
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas2
Referencias citadas29

In US law schools, students not only learn how to "think" like a lawyer (Mertz 2007), but they also learn to "sound" like one using proper voice qualities. This article analyzes the discourses of mock trial judges who admonished female law students for their perceived lack or excess of acoustic amplitude or speech volume. Rather than explicitly comment that female law students sounded too "quiet" or too "loud," however, the judges used two different discourses to comment on female law students' voice quality. They employed direct metapragmatic discourse, voicing female law students in their role as attorneys, to negatively evaluate their low speech volume. Alternatively, the judges applied storytelling as an implicit metapragmatic discourse to comment on female law students whom they perceived as speaking too loud, articulating gendered ideologies about courtroom language that suggest that loud women break norms of courtroom speech decorum. An investigation into the metapragmatics of voice quality thus reveals that the mock trial experience can be doubly marginalizing for female law students: direct metapragmatics associates their low volume with weakness, and implicit metapragmatics associates their high volume with negative, unfeminine, and unlawyerly traits

Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies · Law in Society and Culture · Linguistic Variation and Morphology