Representation of Discourse Features of Lawyers on Judge Persuasion From Forensic Linguistics Perspective: A Case Study of the Discourse of Criminal Cases

The purpose of this study is to investigate the procedures of persuasion of judges by lawyers in the Iranian criminal and legal courts based on the critical discourse analysis approach. The methodological nature of this research is descriptive-analytic and the authors have collected the data by referring to courts, Tehran courts, and lawyers' offices, by studying hundreds of cases and observing dozens of interrogations in 1397, then analyzed 50 excerpts of conversations of participants (10 cases) based on Laclau and Mouffe's approach (1985,2001,2002). The main features of this approach are: signifier and signified, restlessness, antithesis, hegemony and fixation of meaning, power, myth and social imagination and metaphor, subject position and political subjectivity. According to the discourse of lawyers, it can be said that they use from the establishment of the semantic system of discourse including such words as client release, mitigation of punishment, proving the guilt of the accused, and seeking punishment for the accused, each of which establishes its own signifier with specific concepts, as influential cognitive and behavioral factors for persuasion. The main question of the present study is how the concept of persuasion is reflected in the conversations of lawyers in court discourse. The results showed that lawyers express their client's strengths and rival's weaknesses using backgrounding and foregrounding. So, in order to persuade judges to defend their client, lawyers use backgrounding to express rival’s weakness with the negative bias, and also they use foregrounding to provide theirs clients strengths with the positive bias.