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http://das.sagepub.com/Discourse & Society

http://das.sagepub.com/content/13/4/469Theonline version of this article can be foundat:

DOI: 10.1177/0957926502013004454

2002 13: 469Discourse SocietyGregory M. Matoesian and James R. Coldren, JR

Language and bodily conduct in focus group evaluations of legal policy

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A B S T R A C T

. Despite the growing importance of focus group interviews for theevaluation 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 group interview designed to help evaluate community-

policing outcomes. We begin by discussing the linguistic ideologies of focus

groups and show how these presuppositions shape the interaction among focus

group moderator, members of the evaluation team and community

interviewees. The remaining parts of the article demonstrate how a

communicative misalignment emerges in the production and interpretation ofverbal and nonverbal activities a state of crosstalk with stark consequences

for the assessment of legal change. By focusing on the interpenetration of

language and the body in the contextualization of meaning, we outline an

approach that allows researchers to track the elusive, yet crucial, relationship

between legal process and outcome.

K E Y W O R D S : contextualization cues, direct speech, focus groups, identity, language

and body movement, transposition

Introduction

Despite the massive growth in the criminal justice system, many researchers

claim that citizens have lost confidence in the ritualistic bureaucracies of justice

administration and become disillusioned with the traditional crime control func-

tion of police, courts and corrections (Bazemore, 2000; Clear and Karp, 1999;

Greene, 2000).1 In response, community justice has developed as one of the most

significant indeed some say revolutionary instances of legal change in the

USA (and many other western countries), specifically designed to restore public

A RT I C L E 469

Language and bodily conduct in focusgroup evaluations of legal policy

G R E G O R Y M . M A T O E S I A N A N D

J A M E S R . C O L D R E N J RU NI VE RS IT Y O F I LL IN OI S AT C HI CA G O

Discourse & Society

Copyright 2002SAGE Publications

(London,Thousand Oaks, CA

and New Delhi)Vol 13(4): 469493

[0957-9265(200207) 13:4;

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confidence in the justice system by incorporating the community as an integral

component of the criminal law.2 In essence, community justice emphasizes a shift

from crime control to quality of communal life and in doing so complements

formal mechanisms of social control: citizens make a significant difference by

lowering crime rates and making safer communities.Of course, the most celebrated and clearly defined form of community justice is

community policing (Skogan and Hartnett, 1997). Although analytic conceptu-

alizations of community policing differ across localities, organizations and theor-

etical frameworks, most researchers agree that it involves the following:

decentralization of authority for crime and social disorder problem-solving,

policecommunity partnerships and equality in decision-making, use of scientific

models to identify, implement and assess crime-solving activities, training for

both police and community members, and, most relevant for the analytic focus of

this chapter, evaluation of training (Rosenbaum, 1994). In more substantive

terms, community policing involves a shift from the professional style of policing,

which emphasizes quick response times and motorized patrols, to partnerships

between the police and community, and these include neighborhood watch

groups, police interaction with community members and involvement in neigh-

borhood functions, increased officer visibility via foot patrols, merchant organiz-

ing, to mention but a few. In contrast to the communal isolation of police in the

USA, community policing emphasizes police sensitivity to the needs of the com-

munity.

Some challenge whether community policing represents an innovative change

in American policing and claim instead that it is merely a federal grant programwith poorly defined and conflicting purposes (Kennedy and Moore, 1995). In a

more radical or Foucauldian vein, community policing may constitute just a new

rationality of governance a new disciplinary technique of social control that

provides gatekeepers of the criminal justice system with more legitimate tech-

niques for regulating problem populations (a point we return to in the conclu-

sion). Yet other researchers and practitioners of the American justice system

claim that something different is happening in American policing (Bazemore,

2000; Clear and Karp, 1999: 15). In any event, that President Clinton and the

United States Congress have budgeted 1.3 billion dollars for community policingin FY 2001 and that the majority of American police departments have adapted

a community-policing approach are indications of a major trend in this particu-

lar style of policing.3

Of course, given such a large expenditure of public funds, the quantitative and

qualitative evaluation of community policing represents a central research pro-

gram in itself, and such assessments are typically mandated by funding agencies

and thus included in the design of the program. On the more orthodox dimension

of evaluation, quantitative researchers have focused on the instrumental out-

comes of community-policing practices, such as reduction in quantifiable

indicators of crime and social disorder (e.g. calls for service or crime reported),

and have gathered surveys on fear of crime or satisfaction with police. On the

470 Discourse & Society 13(4)

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qualitative side, evaluation researchers have examined the effectiveness of train-

ing development and delivery for the police and community through focus group

interviews (asking, for example, Was the training successful?) an important

and increasingly frequent research tool in the evaluation of social and criminal

justice programs.4

This research examines the focus group interview as an evaluation tool. But we

offer a rather novel approach to the use of this research method in the realm of

legal studies. We analyze the interpenetration of language use and other com-

municative modalities, such as bodily motion, gaze and gesture, in the focus

group interview and the relevance such communicative practices possess for the

evaluation of legal change and social policy initiatives an evaluation role rarely

(if ever) bequeathed to interactional practices. We show how an analysis of a brief

snippet of communicative action can add a breadth of insight and depth of

microcosmic detail to the evaluation of legal outcome, evaluations typically sev-

ered from the interactional work of production. We investigate the discursive and

interactional processes through which evaluators assess the outcome of new

legal mandates. Rather than take-for-granted the interactional work en route to

evaluation outcome, we turn the interactional process into a topic in its own right

and track the delicate, yet tenuous, relationship between process and outcome in

the concrete details of situated practices: in the law in action. We analyze the

interactional practices of the focus group interview prior to those practices being

domesticated into the applied aims of the evaluation report and translated into

public policy.

The first section provides an overview and critique of focus group interviewsand the linguistic ideologies underpinning their use. In the next section, we intro-

duce the data and analyze the relevance of a spate of crosstalk in the focus group

and beyond, paying particular attention to fine-grained production and coordi-

nation between poetic discourse, such as parallelism, reported speech and into-

nation, and bodily conduct, such as gaze, gesture and movement. We examine

how such multimodal communicative practices mutually elaborate one another

in allusive, emergent fashion to index social identity, construct moral footing and

shape epistemological stance. The final section builds on Gumperz notion of con-

textualization cues to consider how differences in group membership and insti-tutional relevancies may generate the misunderstanding between focus group

participants and members of the evaluation team, an interactional outcome with

stark consequences for evaluation of legal policy.

Focus groups

Focus group interviews are group discussions about a given topic selected by a

moderator (Kitzinger, 1994). The open-ended questions of focus groups add

qualitative depth and understanding to the participants perspective infor-

mation typically absent in the standardized, closed questionnaires characteristic

of survey research. According to one researcher, in focus groups You talk to

Matoesian and Coldren: Language and bodily conduct 471


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people, and you report what they said (Morgan, 1998: 7) (our emphasis). Of

special interest here: focus groups represent a major technique for gathering data

on the effectiveness of criminal justice programs and legal policy initiatives, that

is, for evaluating the outcomes of legal change (Morgan, 1996: 1323; Patton,

1987: 136). As Morgan (1998: 15) notes: Discussions in focus groups can giveyou insight into how and why you got the outcome that you did . . . whether a

project is a success or a failure. Most relevant to the ensuing analysis, the com-

munity-policing program examined in this study employs focus groups, along

with orthodox quantitative techniques, as a research tool for evaluating training

success or failure (as we will see, for example, Was the Programs training suc-

cessful? or What did you get out of the training?).5

Although focus groups indeed differ from survey research and other interview

techniques, they still share a crucial feature. Focus groups, like other types of

interviews, incorporate a narrow preoccupation with the referential content

of talk, a preoccupation with the decontextualization and recontextualization of

discourse in the practical form of an evaluation summary. As Myers (1998: 106)

states in his critique: The aim of the focus group is to reduce raw data to a few

digestible findings by doing a content analysis by choosing sample passages.

Such a literal and narrow focus on surface meaning, however, foregrounds refer-

ential content over the more indexical functions of language and other commu-

nicative modalities, which are tacitly conveyed through poetics features, bodily

motions and prosody, and excludes an interest in the more allusive dimensions of

constructing meaning in context. Moreover, Silverstein (1981), Briggs (1986)

and other linguists have discovered that it is precisely the referential transmissionof topical content talk that corresponds to extralinguistic reality that is most

available to conscious awareness, whereas more contextually situated features

resist discursive reflection and remain taken-for-granted in the process. As Briggs

(1986: 42) mentions: Most of what goes on in the speech event is indexical not

referential. Traditional analyses of focus group interviews bleach the poetic,

prosodic, and nonverbal aspects of language from analytic consideration, ignore

how they may interact in communicative performance, and thus omit their rel-

evance in the evaluation report.

Just as important, to focus on topic talk presupposes that we know what topicsare, that they can be detected and tracked, and that something called a topic is rel-

evant to what the participants are doing here and now that talk on a topic is rel-

evant to the organization of interaction. But people engage in any number of

activities when they talk, and talk on or about a topic is only one of them.

In a more extended vein, focus groups operate via the intersection of several

linguistic ideologies commonsense beliefs about language use for their mutual

intelligibility as a rational, authorized and legitimate form of scientific knowl-

edge: the stability (and officially authorized view) of context, the unilateral flow

of information, and, as mentioned, the referential function of language.6 Focus

group researchers view context as a stable or preformed entity rather than an

emergent and dynamic contextualization process unfolding on a moment-by-



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moment basis in the very linguistic details of its realization. Directly germane to

this point, they proceed under the assumption that because the focus group mod-

erator and members of the evaluation team officially authorize the relevance of a

specific speech event and frame the topic in an explicit way, interviewees will

honor or continuously honor the same discursive designations (Briggs, 1986).Focus group researchers assume a passive interviewer who passively and neu-

trally reports what is said, who merely elicits pregiven opinions or information

from interviewees. More accurately, however, the focus group interview, like

other interviews and conversations more generally, constitutes a co-constructed

and mutually shaped dialog between active interviewer and interviewees

(Duranti, 1986; Goodwin, 1986; Holstein and Gubrium, 1997). As mentioned

above, focus group researchers presume the relevance of referential transmission

of information and neglect the situated co-construction and co-contextualization

of meaning the indexical functions of language. Needless to say, the interpene-

tration of these ideologies plays a vital role in shaping the production and recep-

tion of talk, not only in the focus group interview itself, but also in the subsequent

assessment of that talk by the evaluation team.7

Using a focus group discussion designed to assess the effectiveness of legal

change, this article analyzes the interactional practices or raw data of focus

groups prior to objectification of those practices in the evaluation summary. We

describe the use of language and other semiotic resources en route to evaluation

findings. Building on the insights of Maynard and Schaeffers (2000) study of

survey research, we explore the interaction constituting the data that feed into

the evaluation report and track the processoutcome relationship in legal evalu-ation. In so doing, we investigate the tacit interpretive work and contextualization

cues that enable the production of objective evaluation findings on law and legal

change. Moving beyond what Briggs (1986) refers to as the objectivist ideologies

underpinning interview regimes, we show how the interpenetration of commu-

nicative modalities and interpretive frames convey allusive, yet crucial, meanings

about law and how significant insight about both focus group methodology and

legal policy may emerge from an in-depth glimpse of these semiotic resources in

the constitution of cultural identity. Although this may doubtless seem an

abstract proposition to most researchers, perhaps better handled through moreorthodox techniques of evaluating legal change, we argue in the next section that

such issues find their primordial locus in the microcosmic details of situated

activities.

Language and bodily conduct in the focus group

Before turning to our analysis, we provide a brief overview of the specific

community-policing program that is the focus of interest, which we simply refer to

as the CPP. The CPP is a US Department of Justice, Office of Community Oriented

Policing Services (COPS)-funded institute with the goal of developing, imple-

menting and evaluating new community-policing programs. It is a collaborative



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effort among 12 different police, community and educational organizations in a

large metropolitan area. It develops new educational and training materials in

community policing, provides training to local communities and evaluates the

success of that training. Of particular relevance for our analysis, evaluation of

training represents a built-in area of speciality in the CPP, consisting of surveys,interviews and focus groups. For the ethnographically minded, all focus group

sessions are audio-videotaped with a single camera. One other note of relevance

here; the focus group participants below come from a small community in the

Midwest of the USA, whereas the moderator and members of the evaluation team

come from a very large metropolitan area. The ensuing example occurs in a com-

munity focus group discussion in which the moderator (M), a member of the CPP

and evaluation team, has asked several members of the community what they had

gotten out of the training.8

Community Members A, B, & C are Sitting in a Circle with the Focus GroupModerator (M) 9 10

01 A: See I- I think again there- theres where my frustration level came up

02 to he:::re ((gesturing with finger across forehead)) (at that police station)

03 (0.3) when you were talkin about neighborhood watches and what

04 have you::: (.) and again (.) Ive not been that involved so to me

05 I was the outsider looking in. (0.8) And the first time (at the

06 police station) they say (.) [Well we have (.) [four hundred and=

[((Gaze center [((Gaze left 45

to Moderator)) to B))

07 = [seventy- [six [neighborhood watches[((Gaze right [((Gaze right [((Gaze center

45 to M)) 45 to C)) 45 to M))

[((Left arm cock))

[((Lateral head jerk))

[((Downward right hand baton or rhythmic beat))

08 [And we got- (0.5)=

[((Left arm relaxes))

[((Midway interrupted downward hand baton or beat))

09 = Im like (.) Well yeah but it hasnt reduced any cri:::me. (0.7)

10 It hasnt- I mean how effective has it bee::n. (.)

11 [So- so why are you telling me that neighborhood watches are the way to go and=[((Open Palms Display . . . . . . ))

12 = it works. (1.0)

13 [It hasnt done anything. (.) [Why do you treat that as a success.=

[((Open Palms Recoil [((Open Palms Recoil

with Shoulder Shrug)) with Shoulder Shrug))

14 = (.) I mean thats where I came from. Then they said,

15 You dont seem to understa:::nd.

16 (0.5) I said, Maybe I dont. I dont understand (0.9)

17 how you could have that effective type sys- system in practice and

18 e(hhh)verything continues to gro:::w (.)19 in::: a negative way. (.) ((I mean) Maybe Im wrong.

20 M: So you had this conversation with the police department? With the



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reading of the exchange. We begin with a detailed blow-by-blow consideration

of As narrative beginning on line 01, and then turn to a more theoretical dis-

cussion concerning how the linguistic, stylistic and nonverbal features of the nar-

rative couldhave been misinterpreted by both M, in the historical conversation,

and the evaluation team, in their subsequent viewing of that conversation.

LINES 15In lines 12, speaker A employs a deictic hand gesture (or gestural deictic) ges-

turing with his forefinger across the forehead that is perfectly synchronized with

the spatial adverb (he::re). In so doing, he first indicates his inner feelings (frus-

trated) about some forthcoming problem through the utterance and second

notes the degree of that problems seriousness with the embodied reference, a

dynamic interplay of talk and gesture. He next mentions the locale of the com-

plaint (at that police station), while still withholding information about the pre-

cise nature of the complainable. In line 3, he continues to contextualize his

utterance, building suspense in the process, and situates its relevance relative to

the moderators question in an expressive repetition with continuative or iterative

coordination, with the past progressive in the first component and zero comp-

lements in the final two components (the second consisting of the set-marking

tag, the third consisting of the recurrence adverb): When you were talking about

neighborhood watches + and what have you + and again. In the ensuing part of the

utterance, A hedges his forthcoming remarks by stating, first, that he has not been

that involved, a claim which provides margin for error, and, second, that he is an

outsider looking in, an epistemological cliche which instructs the moderator andother participants to view his forthcoming observations and comments as objec-

tive. And most importantly, this metaphoric idiom projects an insider/outsider

(Becker, 1963) hierarchical template for evaluative work in As narrative.14 As we

will see, it constructs group boundary, shapes social identity and marks episte-

mological difference in the evaluation of criminal justice programs.

LINES 68In line 6, speaker A initiates the source of this frustration, and he does so through

the form of a direct quote (rather than represent it some other way), with the quo-tative complement in the historical present tense (say) and the reported speaker

in the third person plural (they). Consequently, he provides no clear referent for

the reported speaker. They could refer to the police, members of the community,

neighborhood watch officers, people present at the police station, or some combi-

nation of these. Or it could be doing something else, an issue we return to shortly.

For the moment, let us consider the reported clause: Well we have four hundred

and seventy six neighborhood watches. And we got-. There is something strikingly

nimble about turn-initial Well in the quoted utterance. Whereas the use of Well

after the quotative verb in the reporting clause indeed operates as a response

marker and helps launch the upcoming talk as reported speech (Schriffrin, 1987:

125), it functions here as a special type of intertextual response marker, and this



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is indicated by its placement in the reported clause (marked via prosody and the

slight pause after say).15 It contextualizes the quoted speakers turn as part of a

litany of bragging or one-upmanship talk, as a sequel to a prior spate of inflated

discourse (in much the same way that the following exchange functions with two

six-year-old females: First Girl: Im smarter than you; Second Girl: Well Im pret-tier than you.).16 Specifically, it shows that speaker A is going to take an evalua-

tive stance or footing different not just from the reported speaker(s) they but

from those people or groups involved with they, in a type of they versus we or

outsider versus insider oppositional format. In this case, it points to an insider

(boasting) identity and contrasts this with a more judicious and objective out-

sider stance. Following Becker (in a reversal from his original depiction), it cre-

ates an invidious comparison between community outsiders, who are in an

epistemologically privileged position relative to program evaluation, and pro-

fessional insiders, who are methodologically locked in a quantitative iron cage.

That is to say, discourse marker Well does considerable evaluative work for

speaker A by displaying his moral identity and by shaping an oppositional stance

in the dialog.

The reported clause reveals a litany-in-progress in response to some unspeci-

fied recipient(s), to other insiders, but that litany gets cut-off before the second

item in the list comes to completion (And we got-).17 Although we do not know to

what the second item or succeeding items in the litany refer, we do know from the

form of the dialog that a bragging or one-upmanship sequence in concert with

other projected yet unnamed participants at the meeting is underway. This cut-

off in the self-repair, although not an interruption in the technical sense, stillappears to project a kind of dialogic or virtual interruption, and in the process A

reveals just enough to show the audience that an inflated discourse is in

progress.18

As demonstration of quoted speech is also rich in prosodic information, specifi-

cally prosodic hyperbolism, which consists of an exaggerated form of creaky or

laryngealized voicing. Speaker A shifts to a much lower (or mock) pitch register,

with lower volume and staccato tempo, and deploys this nonnatural prosody (a

different or nonnatural voice range) to contextualize a mimic of the reported

speaker and thus to create a shift in interpretive frame. By prosodically quotingspeech through this pulsating vibration in the vocal chords, speaker A sarcasti-

cally marks an occasion relevant identity for the quoted speaker, and he does so

to display a disaffiliative stance relative to the insider position on neighborhood

watches.

Speaker A not only produces a parodic animation of the reported speakers

voice but also synchronizes that voice with a densely organized array of exagger-

ated body movements, gestures and gaze over the course of the quote: directly

quoted speech superimposed over directly quoted body motion. We can thus wit-

ness in vivid detail not only how direct speech interacts with prosodic and

paralinguistic features, but also how it is coordinated with nonverbal action to

create a mimetic rendition of the other speakers identity and to supply affective



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animation to the insiders voice how bodily conduct works in concert with talk

to produce a moral footing in the narrative.

Let us consider this process in more detail. Speaker A brings his bodily orienta-

tion and gaze into a systematic alignment with each recipient. There is a protru-

sion of the neck and head toward each recipient, as the rest of his torso below theneck remains oriented toward M. At Well we have A gazes directly at M and begins

an exaggerated eyebrow raise (sustained over the course of the number) to mark

a sense of excitement on the part of the quoted speaker. Atfour hundredhe shifts

gaze left forty-five degrees to participant B, and at seventy he gazes back to M. At

precisely this moment, he cocks his left arm (bent at the elbow, as if to throw a

punch) and delivers a downward right hand baton that continues into his gaze

right forty-five degrees to participant C. After completing the number, A shifts

gaze back to M (and the home position), relaxes his left arm, which had remained

in a cocked or springed position, and interrupts a downward right hand baton at

precisely the cut-off on got- in line 08, once again displaying a perfectly synchro-

nized coordination between verbal and nonverbal movements in the stream of

speech. At this point he also relaxes the raised and sustained eyebrow flash and

tensed facial display, which had been superimposed over the course of the

number. Thus, through a mutual elaboration of verbal and nonverbal action over

the course of the direct quote, speaker A signals a realignment and reconfigura-

tion of participation frameworks organized, first, to constitute a common focus of

attention in current discourse and, second, to mark the here-and-now from the

historical speech event.

We can now see that As slow tempo staccato oration allows his gestural andbodily orientation to synchronize with his speech (and vice versa), a dynamic dis-

play of gesture segmenting talk and talk segmenting gestural and bodily conduct,

an ingenuous display of dynamic bodily actions superimposed over the course of

a dynamic verbal demonstration. In terms of moral identity, A deploys this gaze

configuration an orientation toward each successive recipient in a forty-five

degree staccato (or lateral jerked) movement (that maintains the alignment of the

body below the neck toward the moderator while gaze is directed toward each

recipient) to demonstrate for the current participation framework the swollen

discourse of insiders at neighborhood watch meetings.19

Notice, in this regard,how gesture inception marks the number as significant, and this shows how gaze

in conjunction with other bodily motions intersects with speech and prosody to

designate moral footing and construct interpretive authority in the narrative a

heightened engagement with the audience during delivery of the number.20

In theoretical terms, what is most ingenuous about As narrative is this. It

represents a multilayered intertextual configuration consisting of intricately

transposed contexts. According to Hanks (1996: 212), Transposition applies

specifically to cases like quotation, where a speaker signals that a portion of his

current speech is anchored elsewhere. It is the global capacity of speech to create

new contexts on the stage of the present.21 It applies to communicative practices,

such as quotation, marked prosody, tense variation and (as seen here) nonverbal



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action, in which the speaker imports historical moments of discourse into the

current moment of speaking. Moreover, as Shoaps (1999: 399) notes, speakers

employ transpositions to enact a point of view or convey a persuasive evaluative

stance tacitly through discursive form rather than mention it explicitly. In this

regard, As utterance in lines 68 displaces the indexical ground of the utteranceby implicating a multitude of ongoing or nested dialogs (and an issue we consider

later, these contexts can be imagined or hypothetical), multiple shifts in spa-

tiotemporal location, and multiple participant frameworks, which are marked

both linguistically and through bodily motions and gesticulation devices. In this

case, the current utterance is anchored in historical context to accomplish stra-

tegic goals for the speaker of the narrative.

This process unfolds as follows: (i) A is talking in the current here and now with

the moderator and other community members in the focus group; (ii) the direct

quote of the other speaker designates the relevance of historical context; (iii) fea-

tures of the direct quote, including prosodic contextualization, paralinguistic

voice quality and bodily motions, create a level of affective intensity that instructs

the current audience how to evaluate As interlocutor; (iv) turn-initial Well in the

quoted utterance adds another layering of transposition a much more allusive

one by signaling that the reported speech occurs within a boasting participation

frame. Put another way, A is depicting or typifying insiders in a one-upmanship

ritual, and it appears that he has just entered this contest to deliver a dissenting

riposte in a more practical, objective voice.22 Transposed Well signals multiple

layers of context, projects a distinct structure of participation among speaker,

hearers and relevant Others, and invokes sociocultural knowledge of consider-able strategic import. Here we can chart in dynamic detail how the participation

points of the different protagonists can be interactively positioned and interpre-

tively tracked in all their intertextual, transpositional complexity; and (v) much

more speculatively, speaker A may be signaling an allusive evaluation of the cur-

rent context through historical discourse and thus be reflexively projecting

another here and now context and participation framework in a densely layered

intertextual lamination, consisting of an affective interaction between reported

speech and nonverbally reported bodily conduct. As this happens, he creates an

interstitial transpositional space between the immediate speech event and theimplicated dialogs occurring in the direct quote (see Haviland, 1996). He projects

a historical context that reconfigures the current contextual situation and thus

generates a secondary, more allusive yet real time speech event to criticize the CPP

and moderator of the focus group (who are insiders also); the historical situation

reflexively reconfigures the current context by adding another implicated dialog

going on here and now for strategic purposes. As a result, we can witness not

just the community (and perhaps) moderator against insiders at the police station

but the community against the CPP (including the moderator) insiders in a back-

to-the-present participation framework. Speakers not only mobilize current

speech as a discursive resource to signal historical context; those historically con-

texts, once transposed, can reconfigure the current speech event and respective



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participation frameworks as well. A related yet crucial point we return to later: Is

the evaluation teams negative assessment of the community group a response to

this subtle critique of CPP training and evaluation methods?

LINES 914In line 09, speaker A becomes one of the central figures in the historical narra-tive. He becomes a protagonist with the just quoted insiders, and we can witness

several noticeable, indeed dynamic, transformations, as A shifts from quoting the

Other to quoting his own words in the historical dialog at the police station.

First, A introduces his self-quote with the be+like quotative complementizer

(Im like), which is also in the historical present tense, and the choice of this verb

form (instead of say) is an important discursive option. Like in conjunction with

the stative verb is an ambiguous or referentially opaque quotative complemen-

tizer. Although it can refer to actually spoken discourse, it may also mark the

forthcoming speech in the reported clause as an impression of mood, a dramati-

zation of inner speech or thought, which may or may not have been lexically real-

ized during the reported speech event (Blyth et al., 1990; Ferrara and Bell, 1995;

Romaine and Lange, 1991). Whereas say is semantically bleached and fosters the

impression of providing an accurate wording of reported speech, like modulates

the speakers commitment to accurate wording and creates a marked stylistic

effect in the discourse. Especially when combined with the historical present, it

heightens the performance value of the narrative, captures the intense tone of

the prior speech, and conveys an affective epistemological stance toward the pos-

ition of the reported speaker(s) (Blyth et al., 1990; Ferrara and Bell, 1995;Romaine and Lange, 1991).23 It is a multifunctional discursive resource, and may

signal to the audience in conjunction with other indexical signs that this is

what I would have said if I had been in a state of talk. According to Romaine and

Lange (1991: 263): it indicates something that could have been said or thought

without implying the commitment that say does; it hedges the speakers com-

mitment to what was said and blurs the distinction between speech and

thought.24

Second, when A quotes his own words, he not only shifts into a normal pitch

register and voice quality but returns to natural bodily motions also. And he doesso to recontextualize and foreground the voice of the Other and the ideological

oppositions embodied in the dialog. In fact, the markedly contrasting prosody and

bodily motions attributed to the insider voice (on lines 68) become even more

normatively prominent as we see A quote his own words in a natural voice range

and with natural restrained gaze and bodily motions.

Still more specifically, speaker A highlights the insideroutsider opposition

through an open palm display over the course of lines 1112 and two open palm

recoils on line 13, each delicately coordinated with a shoulder shrug (as if plead-

ing for common sense and/or eliciting agreement). In this latter instance,

A brings the sides of his open palms together for a fraction of a second and

then springs them apart in a lateral motion. In so doing, he demonstrates the



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moderate and practical stance of his own outsider criteria for evaluating

neighborhood watches compared to the vaunted insider position.25

Speaker A mobilizes multiple semiotic resources to display a dynamic, opposi-

tional footing toward the quoted materials and deploys the body in concert with

prosody and stylistic elements to coordinate cultural identity and evaluativestance. His voice and body movements (from both the historical and current

speech respectively) appear normal, reasonable and naturally restrained, and this

functions as an iconic representation of his reasonable and practical expectations

about community policing. The insiders voice and body movements, by contrast,

appear exaggerated and unnatural, and this functions as a indexical icon of the

unreasonable position of insiders.26 Specifically, notice how the markedly con-

trasting prosody on the direct quote in line 06 intersects iconically with the mark-

edly contrasting bodily motions, inserting a configuration of semiotic resources

into the stream of speech. In just this way, the body in concert with talk functions

as an interactively organized participation field for the projection of oppositional

stance and institutional identity. Indeed, gestures and bodily motions may do

quite more than make meaning more precise or signal proposition content (what

Kendon, 2000, refers to as the propositional function of gestures). They conduct

moral evaluation work of considerable magnitude as well.

And third, As response begins with the hesitation marker Well, follows with the

weak agreement token Yeah, and continues with the marked contrastive but to

signal a strong forthcoming disagreement with the prior speakers position. On

lines 913, the disagreement is realized through a densely layered form of paral-

lelism and repetition: It hasnt reduced any cri:::me + It hasnt- + It hasnt done any-thing.27 Notice in particular the repetition of anaphoric it and the contracted

hasnt frame over the course of the parallel structure, with the summary formu-

lation (It hasnt done anything) being withheld and placed between the why par-

allel questions on lines 1113: Why are you telling me and why do you treat that . . .?

Notice here too that the cut-off and virtual deep intrusion in It hasnt on line 10

mirrors the cut-off and projected intrusion of the prior speakers direct quote in

line 08 (and we got-). In both cases, the cut-offs occur on the second item in a pro-

jected yet partially aborted litany.

Speaker A indicates the end of his reported speech first with the discoursemarker I mean on line 14 and second with the explicit marking of epistemic

stance (through the Wh-complement with the past tense verb thats where I came

from) to recontextualize and foreground his evaluative footing, revealing the end

of historical speech and thus displaying the relevant participation frameworks in

the intertextual dialog. In line 15 he reports the insider response to his complaint

on line 13.

LINES 1518In line 15, the quoted insiders once again in the third person They accuse A of

an unelaborated misunderstanding (you dont seem to understand). A responds in a

direct quote with the turn initial epistemic adverbial Maybe I dont, and this weak



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agreement is partially repeated in his I dont understand. However, this second

statement of understanding (or lack of) is more than a mere repeat from both the

other speakers and his quoted speech. After a short pause, speaker A resumes

with a grammatically fitted resumption an inter and intra resumptive repetition

in the dialog which transforms his putative misunderstanding into an extendeddisagreement with the quoted insiders and an extended criticism of neighbor-

hood watches: I dont understand how you could have that effective type system and

e(hhh)verything. . .).28 Still and with much greater precision, A produces a hedged

minimal agreement, appears to partially repeat that assessment, and then, after

a short pause, transforms the putative misunderstanding into a grammatically

fitted disagreement, a disagreement expanded through the I dont understand how

you could . . . resumptive clause. This process recalibrates the attributed misunder-

standing into As incredulity about how insiders could claim success for policing

programs based on mere quantitative claims. In this case, it appears that the

quoted insiders have attributed the cause of As misunderstanding to his

parochial method of evaluation. Although A minimally agrees with that assess-

ment, he subsequently turns the tables on his protagonists by re-emphasizing his

own evaluative perspective. By not specifying or elaborating the quoted Others

sense of understanding A can deploy a repeat of their speech as a discursive

resource for poetically foregrounding his own evaluative position in the here-and-

now, his own understanding of legal policy.

To add a further evaluative component into the quoted dialog, speaker A

inserts a marked laughter exhale into the indefinite pronoun e(hhh)verything to

create an iconic representation of the interlocutors position as not only imprac-tical but ludicrous. The embedded plosive particle marks the program as implau-

sible.

Speaker A closes the narrative through the discourse marker I mean and the

epistemic adverbial Maybe Im wrong, and he does so to contextualize the shift

from quoted speech in the historical narrative to a metapragmatic commentary

for the current speech event; the shift distinguishes historical speech from current

discourse and realigns the relevant participation frames for each. Notice too that

the hedge and discourse marker are noticeably lower in volume and tempo, and

this shift in pitch register further anchors the respective participant frames in theintertextual scenario.

Contextualization cues and crosstalk

Precisely how do the aforementioned features of dialog relate to miscommunica-

tion between speaker A, on the one hand, and the moderator and members of the

evaluation team on the other hand? How did M and members of the evaluation

team possibly misunderstand As narrative? Gumperz (1982) discusses what

happens when the interpretation of contextualization cues diverges between

speaker and recipient. Contextualization cues refer to communicative

mechanisms through which speakers signal and listeners interpret the cultural



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presuppositions of a given utterance how speakers enact context, signal who

they are and what they are doing on a moment-by-moment basis through

prosody, tempo, pitch, grammar, hesitation, code-switching, nonverbal elements

and stylistic components. They represent the indexical grounds for channeling

indirect inferences: tacit (not overtly lexicalized) signaling mechanisms rarelyavailable to conscious reflection on the part of conversationalists. According to

Gumperz, discourse involves not only the production of grammatically correct

speech, but also the communicative frames through which participants signal

and understand utterances. However, when contextualization cues are misun-

derstood or when listeners fail to detect their function or when they are neglected

or overlooked, often because of cultural differences or differences in group mem-

bership, a state of crosstalk or miscommunication may emerge.29 Gumperz

demonstrates that such misunderstandings are typically attributed not to

mere linguistic error but to the speakers intent or attitude (for example, being

uncooperative, rude, ignorant, incompetent, etc.) (see also Erickson and Schultz,

1982).

Differences in cultural or subcultural membership and institutional relevancies

may predispose participants to contextualize speech events and the interpretive

norms associated with these events in different ways and thus to reach different

interpretations of the speakers utterance. Scollon and Scollon (1995: 12) put it

this way:

Where any two people differ in group membership . . . each will find it more difficult

to draw inferences about what the other person means.

And later in the same work (1995: 73) they note:

The interpretative process is called interactive intelligence, the innate human

capacity to draw inferences from ambiguous information . . . This process seems to

work very successfully when conversationalists share common histories, culture, etc.

Problems are encountered . . . when participants hold different assumptions because

of membership in different groups.

Communicative and interpretive diversity stems from the socialization of indi-

viduals into different social networks with group-specific cultural and discursive

practices (Gumperz, 1982).Applying Gumperz insights to the discourse of focus groups, we note that

because of the focus group preoccupation with meaning as reference, the explicit

transmission of informational or propositional content, researchers may ignore

the more allusive aspects of meaning in narrative performance. Because of their

predisposition to focus narrowly on the surface topic of talk, evaluators and mod-

erators may not readily appreciate how discourse functions as a dynamically

unfolding, interactively organized process of contextualization, and it is precisely

these contextualizing features that are not readily accommodated by the evalu-

ation summary. Just as important, focus groups attempt to isolate talk on a topicfrom other potentially relevant communicative modalities (prosody, paralinguis-

tic elements and nonverbal action) in the ongoing stream of speech. As we have



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seen, an exclusive focus on topic talk ignores the function of the body as it inter-

sects with speech in the contextualization of socially embodied action.

Moreover, focus groups embody an individualistic ideology that underpins

interview regimes more generally, in which meaning construction is rarely envi-

sioned as a joint, co-constructed activity between interviewer and intervieweebut as a passive or asymmetrical exchange.30 This may leave the moderator and

evaluation team predisposed to interpret utterances in terms of the practical exi-

gencies of the focus group speech event, in terms of explicitly defined issues,

topics and identities, and insensitive to the contextualization of speech events,

activities and identities relevant to community participants. As mentioned pre-

viously, speakers do a lot of things when they talk and focus on something called

a topic is only one of them. They do more than display their opinions on a topic

for the moderator and evaluation team. They may design their talk as a strategic

ideological performance rather than a factual report. And when speakers do offer

opinions they do not usually state what they mean explicitly but often do so in a

highly poetic and implicit fashion, especially if they are producing allusive criti-

cisms of the moderator and/or CPP evaluation team in face-to-face interaction.

Bearing these points in mind, the evaluation teams predisposition to interpret

talk along factual report lines, as conveying exact information, and its commit-

ment to topical relevance may generate a state of miscommunication with com-

munity participants, who may be predisposed to produce and interpret utterances

more as a storytelling performance.31 Seen theoretically, because of differences in

group membership and institutional relevancies, speaker A, on the one hand, and

the moderator and the evaluation team, on the other hand, may contextualizedifferent frames for the production and interpretation of discourse, a stylistic

opposition in their talk. With reference to our data, is speaker A in lines 0119

referring to an actual conversation that occurred at the police station? Does As

utterance on line 22 respond to the moderators topic? Is the moderators ques-

tion on line 20 even relevant to what A was doing in his preceding narrative?

Rather than attempt to identify the putative topic of talk and the relevance of a

specific response to it, we would like to transform the analytic focus and proceed

in a much different direction.

If we reconsider several of the contextualization cues in As narrative, we cangain an appreciation that these index, to varying degrees of sweepingness, hypo-

thetical or imaginary speech rather than literal report talk.32 Direct quotes, third

person quotative frame, historical present, quotative complementizer be+like,

prosodic/paralinguistic contextualization, exaggerated nonverbal movements,

gaze and gesticulations, cut-offs in the stream of speech and gesture, and other

communicative features signal that part of As narrative constituted a represen-

tation of inner speech or what he would have said had he been in a state of talk

rather than a historically accurate intertextual representation. They transpose an

imaginary conversation. Direct quotes, in particular, are not accurate references

to the wording of historical speech but ways of constructing drama, emphasis

meaning in the current speech situation. They accomplish interactional work in



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the here-and-now, and, as Myers (1999: 385) mentions, one important function

of direct quotes in the focus group is to typify an utterance, to index it as a token

of a larger repetitive type/class of utterances (not that they said this but this is

what they always say). Just as germane, As precise representation of the number

(four hundred and seventy six) without any accompanying accounting dysfluen-cies (Hill, 1995: 1367) may serve not only to distance himself from the inter-

locutors stance, but also to signal a lack of personal responsibility for an accurate

fact telling. As Hill mentions, accounting dysfluencies constitute one technique to

project a responsible self who attends to precise representation. This is not to say

(nor is it meant to suggest) that these verbal and nonverbal features unequivo-

cally project an imaginary dialog but that the multiplex interweaving of these

indexical signs point to a fictive performance rather than literal report talk.

What is As speech doing if not accurately depicting historical discourse? As

speech is not so much a response to the moderators question or an accurate rep-

resentation of historical fact as it is a performative critique of community polic-

ing in general and neighborhood watches in particular, a gemeinschaft

metacritique of and proposal for program evaluation. Speaker A is contextualiz-

ing not only his own moral stance, but, more importantly, the communitys eval-

uative footing and cultural identity signaling indirect inferences about the

communitys outsider status. And as we have seen, the outsider criteria for eval-

uating criminal justice programs, which stresses that the quality of outcome

should evaluate the means, is quite at odds with the insider position, which (at

least according to A) stresses the mere quantity of means. Indeed, As virtual

interruption (or cut-off ) of his interlocutor on got- iconically represents his ori-entation to a moral order which disparages bragging about quantity. In a still

related vein, the focus group moderator and members of the evaluation team

might focus on the success of training, whereas community members may expect

overall crime reduction or practical success (perhaps also indexing their stance as

an active partner in the implementation of social control and decision making

process). In this regard, you dont seem to understandon line 15 appears to align the

quoted interlocutor with the moderator and members of the evaluation team

viewing success not in practical but academic terms to question the pristine

parochiality of As evaluative stance. For insiders, community training itself con-stitutes a major perhaps the major criteria for assessing legal outcome rather

than outputs in terms of decreased criminality or increases in community satis-

faction with the program.33

Countering this view, speaker A is not speaking on just his own behalf but is

projecting the gemeinschaft voice of community through his utterances, lament-

ing loss of community control over the legal process. By the same token, his nar-

rative captures more than the speech of the ostensive interlocutors; it projects the

gesellschaft voice of bureaucratically oriented insiders, especially policing pro-

fessionals (and perhaps those community members co-opted by them), and

reflects the general sentiments, standards and practices of this group. As dis-

course contextualizes an insider and outsider categorial opposition rather than



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accurately representing individual speakers: his point of view and inner thoughts

as an outside observer in the current here-and-now rather than as an actual con-

versationalist in the historical speech event. His use of gaze, bodily motions and

prosody over the course of the direct quote of his antagonist cues an interpretive

frame that displays how insiders brag to each other during neighborhood watchmeetings: an iconic representation of the group boasting ritual, an emotionally

charged mimetic performance. In the concrete details of multimodal action, he

demonstrates how insiders take an impractical position of bureaucratic imperial-

ism in their evaluation methodology, in stark contrast to the communitys more

practical stance. In this way, the discursive culture of community shapes and is

shaped by the law in action.

Of crucial import for the misunderstanding between speaker A, on the one

hand, and the moderator and evaluation team, on the other hand: whereas A

appears to be soliciting agreement for his assessment from the focus group, per-

haps inviting other participants to affiliate with his remarks, M expects a topical

response to her query and thus requests a literal reference, which shows little

appreciation for As narrative performance. Through this request for literal refer-

ence, the moderator threatens As face, and this threat would be even more pro-

nounced were A to respond to Ms query. Although As response may indeed

appear off on a tangent, his face would be seriously threatened and his story-

telling performance significantly compromised were he to embark on a

metapragmatic discussion regarding the truthfulness of his tale. His response on

line 22, however, does not so much ignore Ms query inasmuch as it displays that

she misses the uptake of his prior turn, and in this sense it might function as aface-saving strategy and contextualization cue for indicating that his narrative

should be interpreted differently that a different speech activity is in play. By the

same token, M (recall she is a member of the CPP and member of the evaluation

team) may have interpreted As narrative as a thinly veiled complaint directed at

her and/or the CPP and responded to the literal force of his words as a challenge

or counter-accusation. In this case, Ms request for a reference to the identity of

the interlocutors imparts an epistemological lesson to speaker A, and may func-

tion to (re)socialize him to the relevant discourse identities and presuppositions of

the focus group speech event. And there are doubtless other possibilities.

Conclusion

In an insightful critique of focus groups, Myers (1998: 196), mentioned that

researchers need to focus on how something is said not just what on form not

just content. Rather than consider the content of interviews as an unexplicated

resource for conventional coding regimes, we have studied the interactional prac-

tices of focus groups prior to those practices being domesticated into the applied

aims of the evaluation report and translated into objective research findings.34

We have penetrated the elusive relationship between process and outcome in legal

evaluation and sought to develop this relationship as a topic of empirical inquiry.



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More specifically, we have witnessed the role of language and the body in the con-

struction of socially embodied action, the mutual and simultaneous elaboration

of language, prosody and bodily conduct the interpenetration of body poetics

and verbal poetics in discursive action. The body not only contextualizes the

interpretation of stylistic elements in talk (and vice versa), but also helps shapemultiple messages for complex laminations of participation. Although typically

ignored in interview settings, gestures and other bodily motions are not mere pic-

torial or emotional supplements to talk but reveal a moral dimension of social

identity, participation framework and oppositional stance that is not conveyed (or

conveyed fully) through talk alone (Kendon, 2000; McNeill, 1992). That focus

groups effectively bleach such multimodal communicative practices from ana-

lytic consideration seriously compromises their attempt to evaluate the embodied

meanings of community participants.

Because the community may speak a different voice from the academic pro-

fessionals who evaluate them and because they may not use a professional or aca-

demic register (and do not use forms of discourse to signal their professional

identity but to index community membership), their words may stimulate

misunderstanding in focus group interaction. Speaker A brings the rhythms and

sentiments of gemeinschaft discourse to the focus group; the moderator and evalu-

ation team bring the gesellschaft rationality of the legal order. As these differences

collide and fuse in interactional performance, they generate the consequential

crosstalk for legal outcome.35

Rather than take-for-granted these differences, we have explored the linguistic

presuppositions and discursive technologies underpinning focus group interac-tion and how this may mediate the assessment of law and public policy. Yet this

article has not only addressed the evaluation of legal outcome. Still more basi-

cally, it has addressed the interactional resources focus group participants employ

to construct the situated intelligibility of legal evaluation how cultural identity

work is constituted in the form of communicative practices. We have discussed

how focus group participants may construct different conversational norms and

expectations, especially as they orient to narrative performance rather than lit-

eral report talk, and how they engage a constellation of normative voices through

verbal and nonverbal action. Rather than elicit how people perceive success orfailure attitudinally, we have considered how assessments of community policing

are embodied in the contextually situated and interactionally emergent configu-

ration of discourse identities in both current and historical speech. By consider-

ing how something is said, we have witnessed how CPP evaluation practices may

create the very hegemonic discourse that they sought at the outset to overcome.

One of the ways in which one community dominates another is by creating

standards of linguistic rationality, by determining the grounds for evaluating

speech, and by losing sight of how it possesses the capacity to set legitimate stan-

dards of language use. Although appearing universal, these standards may

belong to a particular speech community, not necessarily all communities

(Bourdieu, 1991). As Foucault (2000) observed, new legal mandates, like



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community policing, involve the creation, implementation and evaluation of

rational forms of governance. Although community policing is doubtless an

important form of governmental rationality, the focus group interview designed

to calculate the efficacy of community-policing socialization in the community

is a scientific method of rational governance in its own right. That is, we have notsought to investigate, at least not directly, if the CPP imposes a new rationality of

governance on citizens but how interview techniques and the culturally specific

presuppositions embodied in them may impose an asymmetrical logic of linguis-

tic rationality on the production and reception of utterances in legal evaluation

(Bauman and Briggs, 2000). We have analyzed how focus group discourse

becomes authorized and legitimated as an official research language and thereby

functions as a key source of power and critical element of legal engineering.

On a more positive and substantive note, critical assessments of CPP must also

consider that this organization has a reflexive orientation to its own research,

training and evaluation practices, and this orientation has shown that evaluation

outcomes are not independent of the interpenetration of discursive devices and

bodily motions that mediate the assessment of those outcomes. Just as import-

antly, when we shift our analytic gaze to envision how dynamic bodily actions

intersect with talk to construct epistemological hierarchy, mark social boundary

and index community identity, we foreground culture not as a pregiven or

explanatory gloss severed from real time, on line experience but as embodied

in the concrete details of emotionally charged performance. In the end, we should

keep in mind that it is not just historical difference among the police, community

and researchers or differences in decision-making that are crucial. It is just asimportant to stress that these groups may also construct different communicative

cultures with different ideologies about the role of language in the world.

Community policing is not just about policing. Because the community must be

socialized, trained and evaluated through language, it is just as much about

speech communities and the repertoire of verbal, nonverbal and ideological prac-

tices of these groups. If community policing is truly characterized by increased

police sensitivity to the needs of the community, then it must also be sensitive to

the discourse of community.

A C K N O W L E D G E M E N T S

Thanks to Greg Myers for a very detailed and thoughtful critique. An earlier version of this

paper was presented to the Anthropology Interaction Lab at the University of Arizona. We

are indebted to Jane Hill, Norma Mendoza-Denton, Linda Waugh, and their students for

many insightful observations and suggestions.

N O T E S

1. The US spends 100 billion dollars a year on official criminal justice administration

(Clear and Karp, 1999: 35).2. One of the leading practitioners in this area refers to community justice as the new

discourse of public safety among western nations (Rosenbaum, in press).



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24. Of course, all reported speech is as Tannen (1989) notes constructed speech. We are

only stating here that be+like projects the accuracy value of reported speech to a dif-

ferent degree than other types of quotative frame.

25. This appears to be what Kendon (2000: 56) refers to as a lateral spread, which sig-

nals the speakers stance toward his/her utterance and therefore has a pragmatic

function.26. That is, pretentious verbal and nonverbal speech functions as an iconic represen-

tation of pretentious claims about neighborhood watches; whereas the more con-

sidered verbal and nonverbal speech functions as an iconic representation of practical

expectations. Interestingly enough, A accomplishes his complaint about the one-

upmanship ritual through a powerful form of one-upmanship.

27. Of special note here too is the repetition in upward intonation and vowel lengthening

(or incredulity contour as Norma Mendoza-Denton tells me) on cri:::me on line 9

and bee::n on line 10, both in clause final position.

28. Resumptive repetition (Matoesian, 1997) takes an element from a prior clause and

repeats it in (or near) clause initial position in the subsequent clause as a rhythmicallybalanced continuation, and this process occurs both across and within speakers (or

projected speakers). Here speaker A repeats I dont from the prior speakers You dont

and then repeats I dont understandfrom this prior I dont.

29. That is to say, participants frame the speech event differently.

30. According to Myers and Macnaghten (1999: 181), this renders the interactional

work of the moderator invisible.

31. See Trinch (2001) for a telling discussion of storytelling performance versus factual

report telling in another legal setting.

32. Put simply and stipulatively, speaker As discourse may contain a blend of fictional

and actual elements.

33. At a decision-making meeting to select criteria for measuring successful outcomes ofthe CPP, the Director and a community member clashed over precisely this issue. As a

methodological aside, but not an inconsequential one for the study of talk-in-interac-

tion, we base our observations on extensive ethnographic research with the CPP also.

34. Regarding interviews more generally, Holstein and Gubrium (1997: 111) note that

although interviews are the most widely applied technique for conducting systematic

social science inquiry, they are a neglected realm of social scientific research. (See

also Briggs, 2001.)

35. An important caveat, especially for criminal justice and focus group professionals:

Analyses of cross-cultural interaction that attempt to develop general descriptions

that can be codified and applied to correct communicative asynchrony may well

encounter serious difficulties. Because the misinterpreted signaling mechanisms are

not general but indexically embodied in situated performance, one would have diffi-

culty producing a decontextualized list of contextualization cues to resolve commu-

nicative difficulties with training (a point we owe to Greg Myers).

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G R E GO RY M AT O E SI A N , PhD in Sociology and MA Linguistics, is Associate Professor in the

Department of Criminal Justice at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is author of

Reproducing Rape: Domination through Talk in the Courtroom (University of Chicago Press,

1993), and Law and the Language of Identity: Discourse in the William Kennedy Smith

Rape Trial (Oxford University Press, 2001). His main interest is in language, law and bodilyconduct. A D D R E S S: Department of Criminal Justice (m/c 141), University of Illinois



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