DefinePK

Abstract

Evidentiality is the justification of the proposition. The purpose of the study is to identify linguistic patterns used by a variety of the witnesses to justify their source of information. The researcher has used corpus of testimonies submitted before the Anti-terrorist court Gujranwala by witnesses of cases of terrorism and cross-examined by lawyers. For the corpus analysis, the Antconc 3.5.9.0 is used to identify and quantify the related linguistic items. The study has used the framework of Juana I. Marin Arrese (2011), who classified Evidentiality into four categories: Evidentiality which indicates the source of information, (truth-factual validity, experiential, cognitive and  communicative Marín Arrese (2007, p. 144) measures the level of reliability in the inferential utterances of a speaker by using Palmer’s semantic model of modality (2001). The expert witnesses have an independent epistemic position in the court. Since it is the court that needs expert witnesses to interpret the evidence for it, the expert witnesses use significant cognitive and communicative evidential markers, as they provide objective scientific information for which they use modality markers for already established knowledge. The public witnesses, on the other hand, use communicative evidential markers as they being investigative officers have interrogated other witnesses during the investigation. The private witnesses use more experiential evidential markers as they are more certain as eyewitnesses and have incorporative pragmatic role. The use of communicative evidential markers suggests accumulative epistemic role to the private witnesses.
Keywords: Evidentiality, Evidential Markers, Truth Factual Validity, Experiential, Cognitive, Communicative, Depositions, Anti-Terrorism, Legal Discourse, Corpus