Transforming social actors and positioning the jury in the prosecution and defence opening and closing statements in the State of Minnesota v. Derek Michael Chauvin trial [2021]

With a specific focus on the Chauvin trial [2021], this study examines the prosecution and defence’s opening and closing speeches comparing the positioning and transformation of the jury and key social actors’ identities. Critical discourse analysis (CDA), Corpus Linguistics (CL), and Positioning Theory (Davies and Harré, 1990) are used to investigate how the defendant, the victim, and the jury are positioned and transformed. The computational tools AntConc 3.5.9 (Anthony, 2020) and Lexical Feature Marker 7.0 (Woolls, 2020) identified initial patterns in the data, informing the qualitative analysis. This thesis concentrates on the barristers’ strategic nomination and the surrounding collocations in the opening and closing speeches. According to van Leeuwen (2008), nomination or categorization creates unique identities, drawing on an individual’s characteristics, group membership, occupation, and/or role. It is argued that when ‘a speaker has many options as to what to call a person and chooses one systematically over the others […]’, they are ‘discursively creating’ a specific identity and this ‘shows what aspects of the person the speaker is highlighting in the discourse at that particular time’ (Felton- Rosulek, 2009, p.9). Nuanced nomination is used to shape the social actors within the barristers’ desired crime narrative, through the discursive creation of their shifting identities. Additionally, the positioning of the jury, is explored through the barristers’ ‘strategic lexicalisation’, identified in the transformation of grammar patterns and modality. Positioning, it is argued, ‘[…] direct[s] our attention to a process by which certain trains of consequences, intended or unintended, are set in motion’ (Davies and Harré, 1990, p. 51), signifying the importance of the jury’s position, as their role determines the trial’s outcome. The jury are positioned as observers in the opening and decision- makers in the closing. The social actors and crime narrative are positioned according to each barrister’s ideological stance (blame versus nature).