Didn’t he take a knife? The role of negative polar questions in court hearings within Hungarian criminal proceedings

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Marianna Varga

Abstract

In this study, I examine the function of negative polar questions such as Didn’t he take a knife? in court interrogations. I present the role attributed to this question type in court hearings in the international literature and I also point out the similarities and differences between the negative and positive forms of polar questions by reviewing the semantic and pragmatic features. Following the theoretical considerations, I argue that the main function of the negative form – unlike the positive one – is not to ask for confirmation, but to resolve the contradiction in court interrogations. I propose my argument through the analysis of excerpts of 5 Hungarian criminal trials.

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[1]
Varga, M. 2022. Didn’t he take a knife? The role of negative polar questions in court hearings within Hungarian criminal proceedings. Jelentés és Nyelvhasználat. 9, 1 (Apr. 2022), 1–13. DOI:https://doi.org/10.14232/JENY.2022.1.1.
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Article
Author Biography

Marianna Varga, Research Institute of Linguistics

Marianna Varga is a researcher at the Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics. She mainly works on topics in pragmatics, her research interest focuses on the relationship between law and language, judicial communication, interrogation strategies, the pragmatics and semantics of questions, implicit and explicit meaning generation and the phenomenon of verbal influence.

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