G Matoesian
Biographic Data
| ID | 8426 |
|---|---|
| NAME | G Matoesian |
| GIVEN NAMES | G |
| FAMILY NAME | Matoesian |
| SIGNATURE | MATOESIAN G |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Illinois Chicago |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4774-5408 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 24 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 83 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 24 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1994 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
I Am Not a Computer”: A Multimodal Co-construction of Justice in a Real Jury Deliberation
This is the first multimodal analysis of a real—not mock or hypothetical—jury deliberation and consists of two parts. The first part investigates the interactive contours of laughter and how it integrates with co-speech gesture to provide an authoritative stance to the juror’s narrative. The second part examines the multimodal interplay among poetics, gesture, and stance in pursuit of justice during deliberation. Rather than consider justice as a…
Language of Courtroom Interaction
This revised entry covers the role of language in courtroom interaction, in particular, and multimodal conduct in the law more generally. It examines how legal actors bring multimodal conduct—co‐speech gestures, material objects, gaze, and body movement—to bear on the construction and co‐construction of the legal context.
Something out of Kafka: A multimodal analysis of an actual jury deliberation
The jury constitutes the essence of American Democracy and guards against governmental tyranny and overzealous prosecution. As an instrument of justice and symbol of democracy, the jury consists of a group of ordinary citizens who deliberate in a decision-making process to reach a verdict in a criminal or civil case. And the most important feature in jury deliberation is the interaction among jurors. But since that interaction occurs behind close…
Discursive hegemony in the Kennedy Smith rape trial: Evidence of an age graded allusion in expert testimony
Preview this article: Discursive hegemony in the Kennedy Smith rape trial, Page 1 of 1 /docserver/preview/fulltext/prag.8.1.01mat-1.gif
Historical voices, collective memory and interdiscursive trauma in the legal order
This study examines how collective memory and cultural trauma inhere in the multimodal interplay between macro structures of space-time and microcosmic action. Using a criminal trial as data, we show how collective memories and cultural sentiments function in the multimodal details of poetic oratory and emotionally charged speech to frame evidence, construct legal identity and shape the interpretation of testimony. Legal actors integrate language…
‘She does not flee the house’
This article shows how an attorney's multimodal narrative transforms an opening statement into an argument about the credibility of the main prosecution witness. The defence attorney integrates speech, gestures and exhibits to shape motion events and spatial images into relevant objects of evidentiary knowledge, creating inconsistencies in the witness's account under the auspices of merely showing the jury locations and movements in the defendant…
This is not a course in trial practice: Multimodal participation in objections
Multifunctionality of hand gestures and material conduct during closing argument
Closing argument represents the most crucial part of the adversarial system of justice. For attorneys, it provides an opportunity to showcase their persuasive skills through the full range of semiotic resources at their disposal. While studies of legal discourse have examined speech performance, few studies, if any, have analyzed how speech integrates with gesture and material conduct in the production of persuasive oratory. This work demonstrate…
Stuck in the 60s (and That's Not a Bad Thing): Revitalizing the Ethno Study of Juvenile Court
Language of Courtroom Interaction
The language of courtroom interaction provides an exciting context not only to the study of written and verbal language but also to the analysis of language as a form of copresent communicative practice that integrates language, bodily conduct, and other semiotic resources (see Goodwin, 1994; Manzo, 1996; Matoesian, 2010).
Gesture's community: Social organization in multimodal conduct
This article analyzes the multimodal integration of gesture, talk, and sociocultural context. More specifically, I investigate how forms of Gemeinschaft/Gesellshaft community are embodied in the concrete details of multimodal form-in the iconic interplay of multimodal practice and symbolic forms of social organization. Using a focus group interview of community policing training, I show how criss-crossing laminations of participation emerge throu…
The Language of Law School: Learning To "Think Like a Lawyer." by Elizabeth Mertz
L’ambivalence sociologique du témoignage expert: Conflit discursif dans la constitution de l’identité juridique
Partant de la théorie des gammes de rôles de Merton comme arrière-plan à l’examen d’un conflit discursif entre la partie publique représentant l’accusation et un témoin expert dans un procès criminel, cet article montre comment les participants à l’interaction manifestent une orientation vers des normes et contre-normes ambivalentes dans le détail situé de pratiques interactionnelles. On voit les participants s’efforcer d’articuler les perturbati…
Nailing down an answer: Participations of Power in Trial Talk
This article examines a questioning strategy in trial crossexamination designed to control an evasive witness, and how that control functions through the interactive contours of verbal and visual conduct to index identity, construct multidimensional forms of participation and project intertextual relations. In the process of nailing down an answer, attorney and witness manipulate linguistic ideologies and project participations of power to calibr…
Struck by speech revisited: Embodied stance in jurisdictional discourse1
This paper illustrates how stance functions as a semiotic resource that feeds into and mediates institutional context. I consider stance not only as linguistic expression but as interactive, bodily engagement, synchronized in multimodal layers of participation. Using data from a focus group interview, I examine how stance emerges in the collaborative rhythms of linguistic, paralinguistic and, most prominently, embodied conduct between speaker and…
Law Enforcement, Communication and Community (review)
Language and bodily conduct in focus group evaluations of legal policy
Despite the growing importance of focus group interviews for the evaluation of new legal mandates, we know very little about how these interviews function in the socially situated and concrete details of communicative practice. Consequently, how such practices mediate our interpretation and assessment of legal policy remains an unexplicated topic of social scientific inquiry. This study explores the role of verbal and nonverbal speech in a focus …
Law and the Language of Identity: Discourse in the William Kennedy Smith Rape Trial
In this volume, Gregory Matoesian uses the notorious 1991 rape trial of William Kennedy Smith to provide an in-depth analysis of language use and its role in that specific trial as well as in the law in general. He draws on the fields of conversation analysis, ethnomethodology, linguistic anthropology and social theory to show how language practices shape--and are shaped by--culture and the law, particularly in the social construction of rape as …
Évaluer la police de proximité. Style indirect, ambiguïté et paroles rapportées dans un contexte juridique bureaucratique
Aux États-Unis, la police de proximité constitue l'un des changements majeurs de ces dernières décennies dans le domaine du droit. La recherche n'a pourtant pas réussi à prendre la mesure des pratiques discursives contextuellement situées par lesquelles les initiatives en matière de police de proximité sont mises en œuvre et ses résultats produits à l'intérieur de la bureaucratie juridique. Nous examinons ici comment la culture du partenariat ent…
The grammaticalization of participant roles in the constitution of expert identity
Despite the relevance of language use in expert testimony, researchers have rarely scrutinized the linguistic and interactional processes of constructing an expert identity. This study, rather than reifying the concept of expert and leaving it as an unproblematic legal argument, examines how this institutional identity emerges in and through discursive interaction between the prosecuting attorney and a physician (who is also the defendant) in tri…
You Were Interested in Him as a Person?”: Rhythms of Domination in the Kennedy Smith Rape Trial
In this study I explore the theoretical and linguistic implications of the Kennedy Smith rape trial, using transcriptions of real live testimony as data. I examine theoretically how the logic of inconsistency in trial testimony of the victim and other witnesses activates an interaction among language, law, and culture as an epistemological practice of domination. In microlinguistic detail, I examine the categorization of action, linguistic ideolo…
You Were Interested in Him as a Person: Rhythms of Domination in the Kennedy Smith Rape Trial
In this study I explore the theoretical and linguistic implications of the Kennedy Smith rape trial, using transcriptions of real live testimony as data. I examine theoretically how the logic of inconsistency in trial testimony of the victim and other witnesses activates an interaction among language, law, and culture as an epistemological practice of domination. In microlinguistic detail, I examine the categorization of action, linguistic ideolo…
Language, Law, and Society: Policy Implications of the Kennedy Smith Rape Trial
In this article I examine the applied relevance of trial talk for rape shield legislation and attempts to evaluate the impact of such legal reforms. Using linguistic data from the Kennedy Smith rape trial, I argue that attempts to progressively implement rape shield have thus far failed and that research evaluating its impact has been more or less misguided because reformers and researchers have consistently failed to scrutinize empirically the i…
Why Do We Blame the Victims of Sexual Assault
Language, Law, and Society: Policy Implications of the Kennedy Smith Rape Trial
In this article I examine the applied relevance of trial talk for rape shield legislation and attempts to evaluate the impact of such legal reforms. Using linguistic data from the Kennedy Smith rape trial, I argue that attempts to progressively implement rape shield have thus far failed and that research evaluating its impact has been more or less misguided because reformers and researchers have consistently failed to scrutinize empirically the i…
You Were Interested in Him as a Person?”: Rhythms of Domination in the Kennedy Smith Rape Trial
In this study I explore the theoretical and linguistic implications of the Kennedy Smith rape trial, using transcriptions of real live testimony as data. I examine theoretically how the logic of inconsistency in trial testimony of the victim and other witnesses activates an interaction among language, law, and culture as an epistemological practice of domination. In microlinguistic detail, I examine the categorization of action, linguistic ideolo…
Struck by speech revisited: Embodied stance in jurisdictional discourse1
This paper illustrates how stance functions as a semiotic resource that feeds into and mediates institutional context. I consider stance not only as linguistic expression but as interactive, bodily engagement, synchronized in multimodal layers of participation. Using data from a focus group interview, I examine how stance emerges in the collaborative rhythms of linguistic, paralinguistic and, most prominently, embodied conduct between speaker and…
The grammaticalization of participant roles in the constitution of expert identity
Despite the relevance of language use in expert testimony, researchers have rarely scrutinized the linguistic and interactional processes of constructing an expert identity. This study, rather than reifying the concept of expert and leaving it as an unproblematic legal argument, examines how this institutional identity emerges in and through discursive interaction between the prosecuting attorney and a physician (who is also the defendant) in tri…
Nailing down an answer: Participations of Power in Trial Talk
This article examines a questioning strategy in trial crossexamination designed to control an evasive witness, and how that control functions through the interactive contours of verbal and visual conduct to index identity, construct multidimensional forms of participation and project intertextual relations. In the process of nailing down an answer, attorney and witness manipulate linguistic ideologies and project participations of power to calibr…
Language and bodily conduct in focus group evaluations of legal policy
Despite the growing importance of focus group interviews for the evaluation of new legal mandates, we know very little about how these interviews function in the socially situated and concrete details of communicative practice. Consequently, how such practices mediate our interpretation and assessment of legal policy remains an unexplicated topic of social scientific inquiry. This study explores the role of verbal and nonverbal speech in a focus …
Multifunctionality of hand gestures and material conduct during closing argument
Closing argument represents the most crucial part of the adversarial system of justice. For attorneys, it provides an opportunity to showcase their persuasive skills through the full range of semiotic resources at their disposal. While studies of legal discourse have examined speech performance, few studies, if any, have analyzed how speech integrates with gesture and material conduct in the production of persuasive oratory. This work demonstrate…
This is not a course in trial practice: Multimodal participation in objections
Historical voices, collective memory and interdiscursive trauma in the legal order
This study examines how collective memory and cultural trauma inhere in the multimodal interplay between macro structures of space-time and microcosmic action. Using a criminal trial as data, we show how collective memories and cultural sentiments function in the multimodal details of poetic oratory and emotionally charged speech to frame evidence, construct legal identity and shape the interpretation of testimony. Legal actors integrate language…
Gesture's community: Social organization in multimodal conduct
This article analyzes the multimodal integration of gesture, talk, and sociocultural context. More specifically, I investigate how forms of Gemeinschaft/Gesellshaft community are embodied in the concrete details of multimodal form-in the iconic interplay of multimodal practice and symbolic forms of social organization. Using a focus group interview of community policing training, I show how criss-crossing laminations of participation emerge throu…
Évaluer la police de proximité. Style indirect, ambiguïté et paroles rapportées dans un contexte juridique bureaucratique
Aux États-Unis, la police de proximité constitue l'un des changements majeurs de ces dernières décennies dans le domaine du droit. La recherche n'a pourtant pas réussi à prendre la mesure des pratiques discursives contextuellement situées par lesquelles les initiatives en matière de police de proximité sont mises en œuvre et ses résultats produits à l'intérieur de la bureaucratie juridique. Nous examinons ici comment la culture du partenariat ent…
You Were Interested in Him as a Person: Rhythms of Domination in the Kennedy Smith Rape Trial
In this study I explore the theoretical and linguistic implications of the Kennedy Smith rape trial, using transcriptions of real live testimony as data. I examine theoretically how the logic of inconsistency in trial testimony of the victim and other witnesses activates an interaction among language, law, and culture as an epistemological practice of domination. In microlinguistic detail, I examine the categorization of action, linguistic ideolo…
Why Do We Blame the Victims of Sexual Assault
Language, Law, and Society: Policy Implications of the Kennedy Smith Rape Trial
In this article I examine the applied relevance of trial talk for rape shield legislation and attempts to evaluate the impact of such legal reforms. Using linguistic data from the Kennedy Smith rape trial, I argue that attempts to progressively implement rape shield have thus far failed and that research evaluating its impact has been more or less misguided because reformers and researchers have consistently failed to scrutinize empirically the i…
You Were Interested in Him as a Person?”: Rhythms of Domination in the Kennedy Smith Rape Trial
In this study I explore the theoretical and linguistic implications of the Kennedy Smith rape trial, using transcriptions of real live testimony as data. I examine theoretically how the logic of inconsistency in trial testimony of the victim and other witnesses activates an interaction among language, law, and culture as an epistemological practice of domination. In microlinguistic detail, I examine the categorization of action, linguistic ideolo…
You Were Interested in Him as a Person: Rhythms of Domination in the Kennedy Smith Rape Trial
In this study I explore the theoretical and linguistic implications of the Kennedy Smith rape trial, using transcriptions of real live testimony as data. I examine theoretically how the logic of inconsistency in trial testimony of the victim and other witnesses activates an interaction among language, law, and culture as an epistemological practice of domination. In microlinguistic detail, I examine the categorization of action, linguistic ideolo…
The grammaticalization of participant roles in the constitution of expert identity
Despite the relevance of language use in expert testimony, researchers have rarely scrutinized the linguistic and interactional processes of constructing an expert identity. This study, rather than reifying the concept of expert and leaving it as an unproblematic legal argument, examines how this institutional identity emerges in and through discursive interaction between the prosecuting attorney and a physician (who is also the defendant) in tri…
Law and the Language of Identity: Discourse in the William Kennedy Smith Rape Trial
In this volume, Gregory Matoesian uses the notorious 1991 rape trial of William Kennedy Smith to provide an in-depth analysis of language use and its role in that specific trial as well as in the law in general. He draws on the fields of conversation analysis, ethnomethodology, linguistic anthropology and social theory to show how language practices shape--and are shaped by--culture and the law, particularly in the social construction of rape as …
Évaluer la police de proximité. Style indirect, ambiguïté et paroles rapportées dans un contexte juridique bureaucratique
Aux États-Unis, la police de proximité constitue l'un des changements majeurs de ces dernières décennies dans le domaine du droit. La recherche n'a pourtant pas réussi à prendre la mesure des pratiques discursives contextuellement situées par lesquelles les initiatives en matière de police de proximité sont mises en œuvre et ses résultats produits à l'intérieur de la bureaucratie juridique. Nous examinons ici comment la culture du partenariat ent…
Language and bodily conduct in focus group evaluations of legal policy
Despite the growing importance of focus group interviews for the evaluation of new legal mandates, we know very little about how these interviews function in the socially situated and concrete details of communicative practice. Consequently, how such practices mediate our interpretation and assessment of legal policy remains an unexplicated topic of social scientific inquiry. This study explores the role of verbal and nonverbal speech in a focus …
Law Enforcement, Communication and Community (review)
L’ambivalence sociologique du témoignage expert: Conflit discursif dans la constitution de l’identité juridique
Partant de la théorie des gammes de rôles de Merton comme arrière-plan à l’examen d’un conflit discursif entre la partie publique représentant l’accusation et un témoin expert dans un procès criminel, cet article montre comment les participants à l’interaction manifestent une orientation vers des normes et contre-normes ambivalentes dans le détail situé de pratiques interactionnelles. On voit les participants s’efforcer d’articuler les perturbati…
Nailing down an answer: Participations of Power in Trial Talk
This article examines a questioning strategy in trial crossexamination designed to control an evasive witness, and how that control functions through the interactive contours of verbal and visual conduct to index identity, construct multidimensional forms of participation and project intertextual relations. In the process of nailing down an answer, attorney and witness manipulate linguistic ideologies and project participations of power to calibr…
Struck by speech revisited: Embodied stance in jurisdictional discourse1
This paper illustrates how stance functions as a semiotic resource that feeds into and mediates institutional context. I consider stance not only as linguistic expression but as interactive, bodily engagement, synchronized in multimodal layers of participation. Using data from a focus group interview, I examine how stance emerges in the collaborative rhythms of linguistic, paralinguistic and, most prominently, embodied conduct between speaker and…
The Language of Law School: Learning To "Think Like a Lawyer." by Elizabeth Mertz
Language of Courtroom Interaction
The language of courtroom interaction provides an exciting context not only to the study of written and verbal language but also to the analysis of language as a form of copresent communicative practice that integrates language, bodily conduct, and other semiotic resources (see Goodwin, 1994; Manzo, 1996; Matoesian, 2010).
Gesture's community: Social organization in multimodal conduct
This article analyzes the multimodal integration of gesture, talk, and sociocultural context. More specifically, I investigate how forms of Gemeinschaft/Gesellshaft community are embodied in the concrete details of multimodal form-in the iconic interplay of multimodal practice and symbolic forms of social organization. Using a focus group interview of community policing training, I show how criss-crossing laminations of participation emerge throu…
Multifunctionality of hand gestures and material conduct during closing argument
Closing argument represents the most crucial part of the adversarial system of justice. For attorneys, it provides an opportunity to showcase their persuasive skills through the full range of semiotic resources at their disposal. While studies of legal discourse have examined speech performance, few studies, if any, have analyzed how speech integrates with gesture and material conduct in the production of persuasive oratory. This work demonstrate…
Stuck in the 60s (and That's Not a Bad Thing): Revitalizing the Ethno Study of Juvenile Court
‘She does not flee the house’
This article shows how an attorney's multimodal narrative transforms an opening statement into an argument about the credibility of the main prosecution witness. The defence attorney integrates speech, gestures and exhibits to shape motion events and spatial images into relevant objects of evidentiary knowledge, creating inconsistencies in the witness's account under the auspices of merely showing the jury locations and movements in the defendant…
This is not a course in trial practice: Multimodal participation in objections
Historical voices, collective memory and interdiscursive trauma in the legal order
This study examines how collective memory and cultural trauma inhere in the multimodal interplay between macro structures of space-time and microcosmic action. Using a criminal trial as data, we show how collective memories and cultural sentiments function in the multimodal details of poetic oratory and emotionally charged speech to frame evidence, construct legal identity and shape the interpretation of testimony. Legal actors integrate language…
Discursive hegemony in the Kennedy Smith rape trial: Evidence of an age graded allusion in expert testimony
Preview this article: Discursive hegemony in the Kennedy Smith rape trial, Page 1 of 1 /docserver/preview/fulltext/prag.8.1.01mat-1.gif
Language of Courtroom Interaction
This revised entry covers the role of language in courtroom interaction, in particular, and multimodal conduct in the law more generally. It examines how legal actors bring multimodal conduct—co‐speech gestures, material objects, gaze, and body movement—to bear on the construction and co‐construction of the legal context.
Something out of Kafka: A multimodal analysis of an actual jury deliberation
The jury constitutes the essence of American Democracy and guards against governmental tyranny and overzealous prosecution. As an instrument of justice and symbol of democracy, the jury consists of a group of ordinary citizens who deliberate in a decision-making process to reach a verdict in a criminal or civil case. And the most important feature in jury deliberation is the interaction among jurors. But since that interaction occurs behind close…
I Am Not a Computer”: A Multimodal Co-construction of Justice in a Real Jury Deliberation
This is the first multimodal analysis of a real—not mock or hypothetical—jury deliberation and consists of two parts. The first part investigates the interactive contours of laughter and how it integrates with co-speech gesture to provide an authoritative stance to the juror’s narrative. The second part examines the multimodal interplay among poetics, gesture, and stance in pursuit of justice during deliberation. Rather than consider justice as a…
Political science (18 works) · Law (15 works) · Sociology (15 works) · Linguistics (13 works) · Philosophy (11 works) · Psychology (11 works) · Computer Science (10 works) · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies (10 works) · Law in Society and Culture (10 works) · Law (9 works)