Language& Communication, Vol. 4, No. 4, pp. 24-211, 1984. Printed in Great Britain.

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THE FORM AND FUNCTION OF THREATS IN COURT

SANDRA HARRIS

Introduction There must be very few contexts in which threats are used frequently and predictably. Perhaps partly for this reason, relatively little work has been done which concerns them, especially in comparison with such speech acts as directives or promises. Though as Halliday (1973) suggests, ‘sociolinguistic studies are not bounded by the accidental frontiers of the data collected’ (p. 68), he goes on to say that they do take such data rather seriously. Indeed, a number of linguists have recently stressed the importance of recorded data in natural language situations (Labov, 1975; Hymes, 1977; Levinson, 1980; Grim- shaw, 1982; Stubbs, 1983, etc.) if we are to make any real progress in understanding the area of language usage. If, as Wolfson (1976) proposes, we define ‘natural speech’ as that speech appropriate to a particular situation and/or goal and not merely as casual conver- sation, then formal as well as informal settings may become an important source of socio- linguistic evidence. Moreover, some of these more formal contexts (e.g. courtrooms, classrooms, surgeries, boardrooms) are also of crucial social and cultural significance, with certain of the participants empowered to make decisions which may have important and lasting effects on the lives of the individuals involved.

But even if we accept the value of recorded evidence, need the ‘frontiers of the data collected’ always be as ‘accidental’ as Halliday suggests? Is recorded data necessarily a matter of having to wait patiently until some speaker produces a particular utterance so that we can take account of the relevant features embodied in it? Certainly in conjunction with threats, the answer to both questions is clearly ‘no’, since the English magistrates’ court provides a consistent context which can be recorded and in which threats are both predictable and frequent. In twenty-six such cases recorded over a number of months, sixteen involved threats; and all five of the magistrates recorded employed them. Hence some fifty threats were recorded as they occurred in a natural language situation (see Appendix). 1

Moreover, in this context threats are necessarily limited in scope semantically. In this division of the court the magistrate has the power to impose only one punishment (prison) subject to the non-fulfilment of one condition (payment of fine/maintenance); he cannot pose other conditions or threaten diverse punishments. Although he can remit arrears at his own discretion, he cannot impose a further fine or a higher weekly amount of mainten- ance except through due process of law.

Hence, as a semantic category threats in a court context are subject to severe con- straints in comparison with, for example, Halliday’s mother-child control situation, where the mother has a much greater number of options ranging from physical

Correspondence relating to this paper should be addressed to Dr. S. Harris, Department of Literature, Languages and Philosophy, Trent Polytechnic, Clifton, Nottingham NGl 1 8NS, U.K.

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punishment to loss of privilege and probably others. On the other hand, one wouldn’t want to claim too much. There is even here a certain amount of semantic variation, despite the

fact that the basic underlying proposition remains consistent. For example, the con- ditional part of the proposition can sometimes involve ‘making an offer to the court’, which is the first step in payment, or it can be implicit, such as ‘taking this seriously’ or ‘having the right attitude’ towards payment, which is in effect paying. The consequents (to use Green’s term) part of the proposition can take the form of a suspended sentence or, in less serious cases, being brought back to court, or again implicitly, being in ‘serious trouble’ or ‘hearing from the court’. However, as with payment and the conditional part of the threat, the basic underlying consequents is still imprisonment, and its interpretation as such depends on contextual rather than linguistic knowledge.

By propositional content then I mean something which is closer to Labov and Fanshel’s (1977) definition than to Searle’s. Searle (1971) is defining propositions basically with reference to isolated sentences and regards the underlying semantic content of a sentence

as the proposition. He thus distinguishes between ‘function-indicating devices’ and propositional content, with the former determining illocutionary force. Labov and Fanshel, on the other hand, are analysing utterances in context and define their prop- ositions as ‘recurrent communications’; they represent the cognitive component of conversational transactions, in other words ‘what we are talking about’, or what is ‘really being talked about’. Since they are being examined as utterances in context, implicit threats can only be interpreted in terms of their underlying proposition on the basis of shared knowledge of the situation. For example, an utterance like ‘don’t delay on this (payment) because you could find yourself in serious trouble’ is recognisable as expressing the underlying threat ‘if you don’t pay your fine, you’ll go to prison’ on the basis of Labov and Fanshel’s account but not according to Searle’s. What ‘serious trouble’ explicitly refers to is only knowable in context by the participants in the interaction on the basis of their shared knowledge. In this sense, the underlying proposition of threats uttered in this context is essentially the same, since the magistrate’s power over the defendant is limited.

Hence it is worth stressing once more the methodological point that such data involve a natural control over the semantic content of a particular speech act (the threat) which is not often possible in analyses of natural language. Hymes (1977) argues that ‘to consider discourse as situated is not to refer it to an infinity of possible contextual factors’ (p. 102)

and points out that too often linguists and perhaps others do tend to imagine that when a door is opened on a level beyond the familiar, everything in the universe will rush in (Hymes, 1977).

The use of threats in this context provides a particularly interesting example of how it is possible to investigate variation in form in relation to function and semantic content while keeping the universe firmly at bay.

What is a threat? Threats are difficult to define precisely and have been approached from a variety of

different standpoints. Halliday (1973) considers threats as a semantic category and has attempted to associate them with specific syntactic forms which make up semantic networks of possible alternatives. Thus three forms of a conditional threat which appear to have the same meaning

FORM AND FUNCTION OF THREATS IN COURT 249

If you do that again I’ll smack you Do that again and I’ll smack you Don’t do that again or I’ll smack you

are probably not merely free variants but realise more delicate sub-options in a particular semantic network. Turner (1972), whose work is based on Halliday’s, also makes use of semantic networks in his investigation of threats as a mode of control in regulative contexts.

Speech act theorists appear to be little concerned with threats, and they do not figure in Searle’s ‘alternative taxonomy’ (1976). In her scale of impositives, Green (1975) includes warnings and suggestions but excludes threats from consideration. Fraser (1975) clearly regards threats as an illocutionary act and considers them as a special type of warning, requiring a modified definition which includes the speaker’s responsibility for carrying out an action which has consequences disadvantageous to the hearer. Fraser further suggests that the doubtful performative status of ‘threaten’ is not an idiosyncracy of the verb itself but due to certain principles of conversational behaviour, namely, assuming an orientation which will guarantee hearer disfavour.2

Given the data-based approach of much of discourse analysis and ethnomethodology, it is not surprising that there is little reference to threats, since there are few contexts which can be easily recorded that are likely to involve threats except by chance. In their investigation of classroom discourse, Sinclair and Coulthard (1975) do not include threats as one of their twenty or so discourse acts, although, given the classroom context, it is conceivable that they might feature on such a list. Both Ervin-Tripp (1976) and Labov and Fanshel (1977) briefly mention threats in conjunction respectively with directives and challenges, and both state explicitly that they will not deal with them. Although a number of studies have been made of courtroom discourse (Atkinson and Drew, 1979; Danet, 1980a, b; O’Barr, 1982, etc.) none of these writings deal with threats, presumably because of the nature of the recorded data. Even where such studies are concerned with power strategies in court (O’Barr) or accusations (Atkinson and Drew), threats do not feature.

Hence the theoretical assumptions and terms of reference as well as the definitions of threats posed by various linguists differ widely. While speech act theorists are more generally concerned with speaker-hearer relationships and both their illocutionary and perlocutionary effects,3 Halliday and Turner approach the variance in the form of threats as a semantic network offering alternatives in ‘meaning potential’, to use Halliday’s term. For perhaps obvious reasons, no recorded evidence (or observations) of threats actually occurring in a ‘real’ situation is produced by any of these writers.

Part of the difficulty in defining threats is, as both Halliday and Turner recognise, that they may vary considerably in both semantic and syntactic form. They may be conditional or unconditional; and they may be explicit or implicit. In addition, these variations are not unrelated, in that what appears to be an unconditional threat may often mean that the condition is implicit. In the Arrears and Maintenance division of the English magistrates’ courts there can be no unconditional threats; the magistrate has no power to send the defendant to prison, and hence cannot threaten him, except where the condition that he pays his fine/maintenance is unfulfilled. For example, in the following utterance addressed by a magistrate to a defendant

M: there are other alternatives which can be much harsher than the one we’ve give you today and you know that

250 SANDRA HARRIS

the threat is implicit, calling explicitly on the shared knowledge of the defendant, and the ‘condition’ is not signalled grammatically but lexically through the meaning of ‘alterna- tives’. The ‘alternatives’ which the defendant is being called upon to recognise are either

paying his maintenance or being sent to prison. Certainly it would be extremely difficult to devise a definition based on syntax which would generate such an utterance as a threat.

Probably even outside magistrates’ courts, unconditional threats, i.e. those which contain no explicit or implicit condition, are fairly uncommon. Presumably if I run into your brand new car and you jump out and verbally threaten to punch me in the nose, your threat is unconditional, but such situations are (hopefully) fairly infrequent, much less frequent than, say, those which involve categorical promises. Moreover, conditional threats are often difficult to distinguish syntactically from certain other speech acts, e.g. warnings or promises:

(threat) a. If you hit your brother again, you’ll get smacked. (promise) b. If you walk the dog, you’ll be rewarded. (warning) c. If you touch the cooker, you’ll get burned.

However, since ‘threaten’ is not usually a performative verb like ‘warn’ and ‘promise’, the act of threatening may always contain a certain degree of implicitness.

Although the variance of form poses problems for precise definition, it is also a source of considerable interest in considering threats as they are actually employed in any par- ticular context. Since no unconditional ones occur in court, I shall confine my discussion in this paper to conditional threats. In general terms, then, a threat requests the hearer to fulfil some condition which the speaker regards as desirable or be subjected to some kind of punishment which the hearer regards as undesirable and which is to be enacted or brought about by the speaker or the speaker as representative. Bearing in mind this definition, my purpose here is to consider briefly some of the implications of theoretical approaches to threats in relationship to their actual occurrence in a natural language situation; since most threats in this court are repeated several times, this will necessarily involve consideration of the form and significance of the repetition of threats.

Threats as intensified directives One might begin by asking why threats are predictable in this type of court discourse

and what function they serve there. In a courtroom situation, threats and directives are more closely related than in many other contexts, since threats must necessarily contain a condition. As the central force of this particular magistrates’ court is directed towards getting the defendant to do something, the directive in a variety of forms becomes a primary means of control and of the imposition of the power of the court (Harris, 1981). But because magistrates often believe that not only does the defendant not want to perform the requested act (i.e. paying his fine/maintenance) but is also unwilling to do so, some kind of pressure beyond the giving of a directive must be exercised by the court to ensure that he does. This pressure most often takes the form of a threat.

Although magistrates can and do appeal to defendants’ sense of obligation, reason, social conscience, status, self-interest, etc., their ultimate power over the latter is a prison sentence and the threat of physical incarceration. Lesser threats, such as being brought back to court, also feature in court discourse; but implicit in these is still the ultimate

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threat of prison. Thus, though sometimes implicit, the condition of the threat always has directive force, and the consequents is added in order to intensify that force.

However, if the effect on the directive element is to intensify its illocutionary force, the social meaning of threats and their social distribution does differ markedly from that of directives. While directives can range in intensity from polite requests to orders, threats presumably have no such range but are always at the fierce end of any scale, unless used facetiously. In addition, for a threat to be effective, the speaker must have real power to bring about the stated consequences, which suggests an asymmetrical situation or at least one where real power is involved. Thus threats tend to occur where such power exists, whether the situation is a mother controlling her child, a manager threatening to dismiss his employee, or a trade union leader threatening to cripple the country. Threats are an attempt to impose the will of the speaker on the hearer/s by controlling his/her behaviour in some way, whether positively or negatively; unlike the more polite forms of directives, they inevitably assert the power of the speaker.

Consequently, in the Arrears and Maintenance Court threats occur only in conjunction with directives of payment. The directive can either be incorporated into the condition explicitly,

M: if you fail to pay regularly the one pound a week off this fine-you’ll be visited by the police and taken to prison for sixty days

or followed by a threat in which the conditional ‘if’ + not by substitution refers back to the initial directive,

M: now that is a total of six pounds a week-six pounds a week and every week-and you’ll be back in court again if not

or incorporated lexically into the consequents, M: because you can go to prison for non-payment of fines

or merely implicit in the consequents, M: you’re here this afternoon to show cause why a commitment warrant should not be issued

The variation in surface form is considerable, even in a clearly defined and consistent context such as this one.

Threats as ‘if . . . then’ conditionals Green (1975) argues that the basic form of a conditional threat is an ‘if . . . then’ state-

ment. In other words, if the addressee as agent does or does not perform some act, then the stated consequences will be a punishment enacted by the speaker or the speaker as representative. As Green’s examples make clear, ‘form’ refers to an underlying prop- osition involving ‘if . . . then’ which is not necessarily reflected in the surface form. Translated into the context of the Arrears and Maintenance Court, the underlying proposition of all threats is the following, with the magistrate as the speaker and the defendant as addressee:

1f you don’t pay your fine/maintenance, then you’ll be sent to prison.

However, threats are often not this explicit and are hardly ever in this precise surface form. In fact, there is only one occurrence of then as a lexical item, and if occurs in only fourteen threats out of a total of fifty. Hence the fact that threats in this context are con- ditional is a reflection of the underlying semantic proposition and the particular situation and not merely the surface syntactic form.

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Since all threats in a court context are conditional, does recent literature on the con- ditional in English have anything to offer which will illuminate their use by magistrates? First of all, a number of writers in the area of jurisprudence have pointed out the con- ditional nature of all legal rules, from which basis the threats uttered by magistrates presumably derive their force:

Legal rules, then, are conditional rules. Each one consists naturally in the definition of the conditions for applying the rule and in the exposition of the rule itself. . . Such a legal rule can be expressed in the following fashion: ‘If. . then’. . Each article of the law does not always necessarily contain these two elements. The rule may be set out in several articles . But all these formulas come finally to, ‘If then’. That is the fundamental formula to which the others can be reduced, while other formulas cannot be applied in every case (Korkunov, 1909, p. 421).

Korkunov too is not referring to the surface expression of legal rules (‘Each article of the law. . . etc.‘) but to the underlying conditional nature of the propositions involved.

Kelsen (1932) puts it slightly differently but also stresses the conditional nature of legal

rules.

It does this not, as is generally the case with the traditional theory, by defining the legal norm, like the moral norm, as an imperative, but as a hypothetical judgment expressing a specific relationship between a conditioning circumstance and a conditional consequence (Kelsen, 1932, p. 433).

However, Kelsen goes on to state that unlike natural law, which links one circumstance to another through cause and effect, the connecting principle of legal rules is imputation and its expression is the Ought.

The law of nature runs: If A, then B must be. The legal rule says: If A is, then B ought to be. When we say: If there is tort, then the consequence of tort (punishment) shall (i.e. ought to) follow, this Ought, the category of law, indicates the only specific sense in which the legal condition and the legal consequence are held together in the legal rule (ibid).

Haiman (1978), in conjunction with conditionals, also rejects the notion of ‘causality’ as an essential part of their meaning in English and suggests that ‘relevance’ is more

clearly involved in the usage (if not the meaning) of conditionals. The idea of relevance brings Haiman closer to Searle’s steps necessary to derive primary illocution from literal illocution (1975, p. 62), Labov and Fanshel’s (1977) sequencing rules and &ice’s (1975) conversational maxims. In fact, Haiman regards relevance as an extra-linguistic law of conversation.

Haiman also rejects temporality as a necessary element of conditionals, and indeed

regards the ‘then’ element of ‘if. . . then’ constructions as a pronominalized form of the

conditional clause (‘if [then] you were the last man on earth, I would marry you’). In this case, the ‘then’ is more or less redundant, which perhaps explains why it does not usually occur (in only one threat out of the fifty recorded) in threats in court discourse. Thus the relationship between the antecedent and the consequents in threats as employed by British magistrates is neither simple temporal nor causal in the usual sense.

Haiman points out the failure of logicians to explicate conditionals satisfactorily by means of logical operators and defined in terms of truth function. Van Dijk (1979) makes a similar point and suggests that in natural languages, connectives in general are not truth- functional but intensional. He goes further in arguing that even a semantic account of connectives can only be partial and that some aspects are clearly pragmatic and require explication in terms of knowledge and expectations of speakers and hearers. Whereas semantic connectives express relations between denoted facts, pragmatic connectives express relations between speech acts, though obviously the two are often overlapping.

Since my concern is with conditionals and in particular with ‘if . . . then’ propositions

FORM AND FUNCTION OF THREATS IN COURT 253

as threats, what relevance is van Dijk’s analysis? It seems to me that threats can indeed be analysed pragmatically along the lines which van Dijk suggests. In other words, the consequence (you’ll go to prison) contains the act of threatening and the ‘if’ clause establishes the situation in which the threat would count. It specifies the condition under which the threat is operable.

Van Dijk points out the similarities between pragmatic ‘if’, ‘or’ and ‘unless’, and my own data substantiate this point:

M: if you’re not paying that-you’ll be brought back to court here

M: so you come back here unless that amount is paid

In the context of a magistrates’ court, these two utterances have a very similar meaning and their function as threats is identical despite differences in surface form.

The need for a pragmatic analysis of connectives is evident when we consider the following examples:

If you don’t pay this fine, you’ll go to prison. Don’t pay this fine and you’ll go to prison. Pay this fine or you’ll go to prison.

Halliday says of similar examples that these three forms of a conditional threat appear to have the same meaning. He states further that they are not in fact free variants but probably realise more delicate sub-options in the semantic network. However, that the connectives ‘if’, ‘and’ and ‘or’ relate the two parts of each utterance in very similar ways is clear. Indeed, if we take into account an implicit threat, we could add also ‘because’:

M: don’t delay on this (payment)-because you could find yourself in very serious trouble (a prison sentence)

The ‘and’ is not additive; ‘or’ does not represent true alternatives; ‘because’ is not causal. ‘If’ is conditional, but not in the logical sense of a proposition either necessary to or sufficient for the truth of the consequents. Rather in each case pragmatically the ‘con- dition’ has directive force, and the connective relates the consequence to the directive condition. Van Dijk states that the ‘or’ variant is less polite than the ‘if’, and in view of Halliday’s remarks concerning free variants, it is interesting to note that neither ‘or’ nor ‘and’ threats actually occur in my recordings of court discourse. This seems to suggest that in fact these surface forms are not free variants but that there are differences in meaning, however slight, which are context-sensitive.

The repetition of threats in court In my recorded court data probably the most obvious feature of threats is that they are

almost invariably repeated (See Appendix). Only two threats are not repeated, and three are repeated as many as five times. Since the propositional content is more or less constant, it is clear that these are repetitions and not new threats. Though some other speech acts (e.g. payment directives) also tend to be repeated, repetition is an even more evident feature of magistrates’ use of threats. The analyst is led to ask two questions: (1) what is meant by ‘repetition’, and how does it affect the surface form of the threat?; and (2) what purpose or purposes does repetition serve? Although a completely satisfactory answer to the second of these questions depends on our success in answering the first, some discussion of the possible purposes of repetition is helpful in establishing the context.

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In an extended comparison of legal reasoning and logic involving Thai and American speakers, Moerman (1973) makes several points concerning the purpose of repetition in natural speech which are also applicable in a British magistrates’ court.

(1) The repeater knows that he is repeating. Magistrates appear to use repetition as a deliberate rhetorical device.

(2) He assumes that his listeners heard him the first time. There is no evidence to suggest that defendants consistently fail to hear threats. On the contrary, it is highly unlikely that on such important issues which can crucially affect their lives either that defendants are not listening carefully or that magistrates do not speak distinctly. In my audio-recordings there was no single instance of a magistrate’s speech being unintelligible to me as analyst, and there was only one (observed) instance where a defendant misheard a magistrate, though on a number of occasions a magistrate failed to hear what a defend- ant was saying.

(3) He thus assumes that his listeners know he is repeating. Magistrates repeat threats for particular purposes and effects on the hearer.

Moerman goes on to state that repetition in conversation serves the purpose of emphasis, that what is repeated from the original utterance and what is added are thereby emphasized. Doubtless with regard to threats this is at least a part of the magistrate’s intention, since threats are an intensification of directive force. They are intended to be emphatic, and repetition serves to accomplish this. One is likely to repeat in any context what is intended to be emphasised, as any teacher knows.

Since Moerman is concerned largely with natural conversation as an instance of practical legal reasoning and with narrative rules of relevance, he argues along the following lines,

For one person to repeat what another has just told him is commonly interpreted as a sign that while he has indeed heard what was said, he has not understood it. To say something like ‘Yes, I understand,’ often makes it doubtful that one has. The surest and most efficient way to show that one has understood an utterance or sequence is to produce an utterance or sequence of one’s own which requires, and so shows, an analysis of the earlier one. (1973, p. 202).

Now this is particularly interesting because it is precisely what the underlying rules of discourse in the court context prevent the defendant from doing. He/she cannot signal his/her understanding by producing an utterance or sequence of his/her own which ‘requires, and so shows, an analysis of the earlier one’ and can only respond with a brief acknowledgement to indicate that he/she has heard the threat but has no means of demonstrating understanding in a ‘practical’ way.

This has two particular consequences for the magistrate’s utterance of threats. Firstly, it makes it more certain that threats will be repeated on the common sense grounds that what is heard several times is more likely to be understood than something which is heard only once. But, secondly, and perhaps more interesting, is the occurrence of threats in conjunction with utterances which make explicit reference to linguistic and/or mental processes. For example,

(I) M: do you understand-now this means that if you fail to pay regularly the one pound a week off this fine-you’ll be-visited by the police and taken to prison for sixty days-do you under- stand that

Since defendants are prevented from demonstrating their understanding, threats tend to be surrounded by explicit requests for the acknowledgement of such, as this one is. In this court, the explicit mention of linguistic and mental processes tends not only to emphasise

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these processes and give them a certain formal status but to make explicit what is usually left implicit. In other words, in most situations the speaker does not explicitly ask the hearer whether he/she has understood; if indeed he/she does, it expresses doubt that the hearer has understood. In fact, except in asymmetrical situations, to express such a doubt would be considered impolite even if one knew the hearer quite well.

Nor do speakers in ordinary conversation usually make explicit reference to the speech act they are performing, e.g. ‘I want to make clear to you’, ‘I think I must tell you’, or even ‘now this means’. Such references, as well as emphasising the processes involved, also question the hearer’s ability to interpret what he/she hears and are again more likely to occur in asymmetrical situations. That they occur so frequently in conjunction with threats serves not only to emphasise the threat but also to demonstrate the magistrate’s apparent belief in the hearer’s inability to interpret and respond to the threat.4

Variance of form Having established that magistrates do use repetition, and particularly the repetition of

threats, as a deliberate rhetorical device, what is the nature of this repetition and how does it affect the form of utterances? Can we generalise in any way concerning its use? Perhaps the first thing we can say is that in natural conversation exact words with the same inton- ation are rarely repeated. Whether repeating one’s own words or someone else’s, there is a tendency to alter them in some way, and it is these alterations which concern me in a court context. Neither Halliday nor Turner deal satisfactorily with repetition, considering it simply as going through the system more than once. Nor does either writer distinguish between the speaker who repeats by taking up different semantic alternatives on the same occasion and the speaker who repeats the same semantic alternative with different grammatical forms. If we were to take the first type of speaker and extend our inquiry to appeals as well as threats, as Turner and Halliday do, then the situation would become very complex indeed, though this might be an interesting exercise. Clearly, in Turner’s sense, magistrates do go through the system more than once and do take up different semantic alternatives even on the same occasion.

However, by confining our analysis to the repetition of threats, we can avoid a number of complications. Firstly, since threats are always issued by the magistrate, we are always dealing with a single speaker repeating his own words and not someone else’s. Secondly, because the propositional content is more or less constant, the repetition of threats becomes relatively easy to recognise even when either the condition or the consequents is implicit. Hence repetition is to be defined in terms of the underlying proposition (You must pay your fine/maintenance or you’ll be sent to prison) and not according to surface form as such. Clearly, I am interested both in how the surface form reflects this under- lying meaning and in the variation of surface form. Hopefully, by examining the variance of surface form, it may be possible to explain the selection of a particular form by a magistrate on a particular occasion. Thirdly, there is the matter of proximity since there are often intervening utterances between the first utterance of a threat and its repetitions. As threats usually occur when the magistrate is making an order and are thus positioned near the end of a case, proximity becomes less problematical. Discourse constraints are clearly important, especially in conjunction with the repetition of threats in the case of defendants who resist the magistrate’s control.

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Yet even when the underlying proposition is consistent, repetition is no simple matter, as variance can be achieved in a variety of ways-syntactic, lexical and semantic. In addition, it is rarely possible to isolate any one means of variance, as they are usually interrelated and tend not to occur separately. However, keeping this in mind, it is still possible to make certain generalisations.

(1) Manipulation of negative and positive elements One of the most obvious features of threats in my recorded data is the magistrate’s

manipulation of the negative and positive elements. Conditional threats have two parts-a condition and a consequents-and each part is either negative or positive. At the syntactic level, the following analysis would apply

neg. pos. If you don’t pay your fine, you’ll go to prison.

pos. neg. If you pay regularly, you won’t hear anymore of this.5

However, negative elements can also be lexical. For example, ‘if you fail to pay your fine’ and ‘unless you pay your fine’ are very similar in meaning to the negative ‘if you don’t pay your fine’, though they differ syntactically. The negative is contained in the lexical items ‘fail’ and ‘unless’. One might go further and say that an item such as ‘prison’ also has negative connotations, which affect the sentence meaning. This can be demon- strated by comparing the following two utterances

You’ll go to prison

You’ll be sent to prison.

Though the first is active and the second passive, they are in fact synonymous as used by magistrates. The negative meaning of ‘prison’ in addition to the context ensures that in the first as well as the second utterance the ‘you’ is not in fact the Actor. It must be stressed, however, that pragmatic considerations are crucial, and it may well be possible to imagine a situation where the two utterances would not be synonymous.

How do magistrates manipulate the negative and positive elements in terms of rep- etition? The following utterance provides an obvious example:

M: starting this Wednesday four pounds a week-and whilstever you keep up that payment you will hear no more of this (3) but if you don’t (2) keep up the payment-you will-and that would be a pity wouldn’t it

The magistrate begins with a directive followed by a pair of utterances in which the negative and positive elements are reversed, which enables him to repeat the basic pro- position but with varied surface form. In fact, the order of both elements and the utterances represents a deliberate choice. The second utterance makes explicit the implicit threat which is contained in the first and allows the magistrate to conclude on the conse- quents element of the threat, which is the most negatively signed for the addressee so that he can then appeal for agreement. The condition of the first utterance (‘whilstever you keep up that payment’) is closest in meaning to the initial directive, and is in fact a form of repetition of that directive linked to the threat.

The following utterance is a further example of an immediate reversal of the positive and negative elements:

FORM AND FUNCTION OF THREATS IN COURT 257

(2) M: the court orders that you pay this eighty-four pounds by the 9th of August-ifyou havepaid it by that time you need not appear here-if you haven’t paid it by that time you must appear in this court to explain why

Again, there is an initial directive, and the second utterance is a more explicit version of the first, not only in terms of making clear the threat element but also in substituting ‘in this court to explain why’ for the exophoric ‘here’. Thus the manipulation of negative and positive elements allows the magistrate to repeat substantially the same content while altering the form. Generally speaking, magistrates seem to prefer the negative condition and the positive consequents rather than the reverse, whether this is achieved syntactically,

(3) M: if that is not done-you yourself will have placed you at the risk of being brought back to this court and sent to prison

or semantically, (4) M: failure to meet one’s obligation in matters of this kind can readily involve you in a prison sentence

where the negative element is emphasised. This is probably predictable, as threats can occur in this context only when the condition of payment is unfulfilled, and it would seem rather odd to say ‘if you pay this regularly, you won’t go to prison’ if you are intending your utterance as a threat.

In addition, the ordering and manipulation of negative and positive elements can also involve variance within each separate element. For example, in a single session conducted by the same magistrate, the conditional element in negative form is expressed initially as

(5) M: if that is not done (payment)

and repeated twice as, (6) M: if you haven’t paid it

and (7) M: if you don’t pay.

Though the act requested here is identical, as are the participants and the threat which accompanies the condition, the ‘meaning’ in each instance is slightly different, and this difference derives not only from the differences in syntactic form (voice; reference; modality; transitivity) but also from the surrounding discourse context. To exercise the degree of delicacy necessary to explain why the magistrate uses these particular forms in this order at these successive points in the discourse is extremely difficult and to generalise from their use in this situation to other magistrates and even other types of situation is even more so. Before attempting it, we need to examine in more general terms several other ways by which magistrates accomplish variation in repeated threats.

(2) Reversal of order of the condition and consequents Another more general way of varying the form of a threat is by reversing the order of

the condition and the consequents. If we consider previous example (2), in which there is an immediate reversal of positive and negative elements, the final repetition of the threat by the magistrate in this case takes the following form,

(8) M: four pounds-first payment this Wednesday-four pounds a week regularly-and you need not come back whilstever thosepayments are kept up-is that clear

Here the negative is shifted again from the condition to the consequent& and the conse- quents is placed before the condition. Hence we can see a pattern of variance in the utterance of three successive threats as follows,

258 SANDRA HARRIS

(a)

(b)

pos. neg. Condition Consequents

neg. pos. Condition Consequents

Example (2)

neg. pos.

(c) Consequents Condition Example (8).

The following repeated threats, produced by a different magistrate, illustrate further the reversal of condition and consequents as a means of variation:

(9) M: the order stands that you pay it at fifty pence a week-and urn--r&r a thirty day suspended sentence-thirty-seven day suspended sentence if you don’t-pay-regularly

This is repeated as

(10) M: you pay fifty pence a week off the twelve pounds and any week you don’t pay-the police can pick you up and take you to prison for thirty-seven days

Both threats follow directives (which also vary in form and minimally in content), and the repetition makes explicit the meaning of ‘suspended sentence’ as well as reversing the order of the two elements.

The next two examples, again by a different magistrate, also involve the reversal of the order of the condition and the consequents, though in different ways. In the first example the reversal is an immediate one:

(I 1) M: you’re here this afternoon to show cause why a commitment warrant should not be issued-we shall send you to prison unless you can explain to our satisfaction why you haven’t been paying.

This is a particularly interesting example, because the elements in the second threat elaborate and make more explicit the elements in the first threat in reverse order.

We shall send you to prison unless a commitment warrant should not be issued

you can explain to our satisfaction to show cause why

why

you haven’t been paying You’re here this afternoon

Each of the elements on the left is an elaboration of the element on the right. Sending the defendant to prison is a more direct and less technical way of stating the issuance of a commitment warrant; the defendant is ‘to show cause why’ by explaining why to the satisfaction of the magistrates; and he is present in court only because he has not been paying his maintenance.

As has been mentioned, repetition usually involves a number of features, which rarely occur in isolation. Nearly all the previous examples have included some form of elabor- ation as well as the feature they were chosen to illustrate. Hence in the following example, the magistrate not only reverses the order of the condition and consequents but also elaborates on the basic initial proposition of payment of fine or going to prison.

(12) M: because you can go to prison for non-payment of fines

This is repeated as, (13) M: if you’re not paying that-you’ll be brought back to court here-and I can’t say that you won’t

be dealt with so leniently the next time

Several points are worth making here. In the initial utterance the usually separate elements

FORM AND FUNCTION OF THREATS IN COURT 259

of the conditional threat are condensed into a single clause, whereas in the repeated threat, the consequents has been expanded. However, although we usually associate elaboration with explicitness, in this case the reverse is true and the final elaboration (‘and I can’t say that you won’t be dealt with so leniently the next time’) is actually an implicit version of the threat which was initially more explicit (‘you can go to prison for non- payment of fines’). This is perhaps partly explained by the difference in modality (‘can’ meaning ‘sometimes’ as opposed to a predictive ‘will’) and the ‘you’ which has a gener- alised meaning in the first utterance as well as being addressed to the defendant while in the second utterance the ‘you’ applies only to the defendant as addressee.

(3) Degrees of explicitness Since features which allow the magistrate to vary the form of threats seldom occur in

isolation, nearly all instances of repetition relate in some way to the dimension of explicit- ness, which cannot be defined by a single feature. Change in form is likely to reflect a change in the degree of explicitness. One might add also that magistrates usually choose to be explicit in varying degrees deliberately and for specific purposes, e.g. to deal with a defendant who they feel is likely to be resistant. Explicitness is a rather vague term which involves a number of related features, and considerable social importance has been attached to the use of ‘explicit forms’, at least in artificial contexts, by Bernstein, Hawkins, Turner and others. In dealing with threats by magistrates in a courtroom context, the question of degrees of explicitness becomes a little less daunting. Firstly, we are dealing with a ‘real’ situation with genuine consequences, not made up stories about picture cards or set-up discussions on capital punishment. Explicitness mutters in the sense that it is crucial that a defendant understands the threat issued by the magistrate so that he/she can take account of it in any future action. Secondly, because threats in this situation are more or less consistent in terms of their underlying proposition, it becomes somewhat easier to say just what explicitness is. Indeed, since I was able to recognise threats on the basis of this underlying proposition and not in terms of surface form, presumably some degree of explicitness must always be present.

(a) Explicit proposition and elaboration. Defining degrees of explicitness takes us into the area of cohesion. In other words, a large amount of implicitness in the actual threat as an utterance is either the result of that threat as a part of the ongoing discourse or attribu- table to its occurrence in a specific context. This is particularly the case inasmuch as we are concerned here with repeated threats, which are all the more likely to involve instances of what Halliday and Hasan (1976) term reference, substitution and ellipsis. However, before examining these instances, perhaps we should begin with threats which for present purposes are explicit, in other words those in which the underlying proposition (payment of fine/maintenance or prison sentence) is clearly present. Since threats do function as a part of discourse, the instances in which both elements of the proposition are fully explicit (no reference to previous discourse or to context) are not as common as one might suppose, e.g.

(14) M: you can go to prison for non-payment of fines

Accordingly, sometimes only one or other of the elements is explicit, e.g. (15) M: any week you don’t pay + consequents (16) M: condition + then you’ll go to prison

In addition, the degree of explicitness is often intensified by adding to or expanding the basic elements of the proposition,

SANDRA HARRIS 260

(17) M: (18) M: (19) M: (20) M:

condition + you’ll be taken to prisonforsixry days condition + thepolice canpickyou up and take you to prison for fhirty-seven days if you fail to pay regularly the onepound a week off this fine + consequents that sentence of forty-two days imprisonment will be suspended-whilstever you keep up the payment of nine pounds until all the arrears are wiped off

Most often elaboration and the adding on of elements occur not in relationship to an abstract form of the basic proposition but in relationship to a previous threat. Hence it becomes a means of reiterating that threat while varying its surface form. Just how this operates in discourse and for what purposes will be examined presently. Meanwhile, if we turn to the other side of the coin, it is useful to consider also degrees of implicitness. How do magistrates utter and repeat threats without making them fully explicit? 6

(b) Reference. Halliday and Hasan define reference in terms of certain items in language which ‘instead of being interpreted semantically in their own right . . . make reference to something else for their interpretation’. They go on to state that

in the case of reference the information to be retrieved is referential meaning, the identity of the particular thing or class of things that is being referred to; and the cohesion lies in the continuity of reference, whereby the same thing enters into the discourse a second time (1976, p. 31).

In English this type of reference is generally associated with personals, demonstratives, and comparatives and it is probably the most obvious way that threats are less than fully explicit. In the following example:

(21) M: so you come back here unless that amount is paid and we expect it to be paid

two kinds of reference are present. The ‘it’ is anaphoric, referring back to ‘that amount’ in the previous clause while the ‘that’ itself refers back to the twenty-six pounds mentioned in the previous utterance. The ‘here’ is an exophoric reference, referring not to previous discourse but directly to the situation, i.e. the court, as are the ‘we’ and ‘you’, referring respectively to the magistrates and the defendant.

There are numerous examples of reference, some referring to an immediately previous utterance,

(22) M: fourteen days as far as you’re concerned-we shall suspend this on the basis that you pay one pound each week every week

where the ‘this’ refers specifically to the ‘fourteen days’, while sometimes there is a wider range of reference, In the following example, the magistrate uses ‘that’ to refer back to a complete timetable for the defendant, including getting a job and making his initial payment which the magistrate has set out immediately previous to the threat,

(23) M: if you have not done that by the 6th of August a prison sentence suspended-over you in this instance of forty-two days will come down upon your shoulders for your non-payment of your wife and child maintenance

While reference in these examples has usually been to a previous directive (except in the case of the ‘fourteen days’), reference is frequently anaphoric in conjunction with a previous threat.

(24) M: because you can go to prison for non-payment of fines

D: I realise that ( )

M: it’s as serious as al/ that

Here the ‘it’ refers back to the condition (non-payment of fines) and the ‘all that’ to the consequents (you can go to prison), where both elements of the basic proposition involve reference. More often, only one element is replaced, as in the following:

(25) M: I’ve left no impediment in explaining whaf could happen if you don’t pay

FORM AND FUNCTION OF THREATS IN COURT 261

in which again it is the previous threat of re-appearing in court and being sent to prison to which the ‘what’ refers.

(c) Substitution. Halliday and Hasan distinguish between reference and substitution on the basis that reference is semantic while substitution is grammatical.

Anaphoric and exophoric reference are both derived from the general underlying notion of recoverability of meanings from the environment

while substitution . . . is a relation within the text. A substitution is a sort of counter which is used in place of the repetition of a particular item (1976, p. 89).

The item which is substituted has the same structural function as the original one. As one might expect, substitution is less commonly used in threats than reference and has a more limited application.

(26) M: very well (2) we’ll say it once more-this week to get a job-next week to work a week in hand -the third week to pick up your pay-and the fourth week and that will be the week ending the 6th of August to begin payment-and if not there is a sus-a prison sentence of forty-two days suspended over you

(27) M: now that is a total of six pounds a week-six pounds a week and every week-and you’ll be back in Court again if not

In both these instances, ‘not’ represents presumably conditional clausal substitution in Halliday and Hasan’s terms, though in neither case is there a simple relationship with a previous clause as in Halliday and Hasan’s examples. While clearly we are dealing here with the presupposition of an item in structure which acts as a substitute, the element for which it is substituted is more elusive. In the first example, the ‘not’ refers not to a single clause but to the immediately preceding timetable, consisting of a number of clauses. Hence the ‘not’ refers to the whole of the timetable, which is itself a repetition of an earlier more elaborated version of the same thing. In the second example, again the substitution of ‘not’ is not precisely for ‘six pounds a week and every week’, which is itself elliptical.

(d) Ellipsis. This brings us to ellipsis, which Halliday and Hasan consider as a form of zero substitution. An elliptical item is one which leaves specific structural slots to be filled from elsewhere. Unlike the previous examples, where an explicit ‘counter’ was used, i.e. ‘not’, in ellipsis nothing is inserted into the slot.

(28) M: whilstever you keep up that payment you will hear no more of this (3) but if you don’t (2) keep up the payment--you will

(29) M: We shall suspend this on the basis that you pay one pound each week every week-first time you fail you won’t come back here-you’ll go straight to Lincoln

(30) M: I think this uh suspended commitment-uh-uh-should continue-so that youpuy

In the first two examples, what has been left out is easily recoverable from the immediately preceding discourse, i.e. ‘you will hear more of this’ and ‘you fail to pay the pound each week and every week’. In the final example, what is missing is only more generally recoverable from the preceding discourse and probably does not relate directly back to any particular utterance, i.e. ‘so that you pay your maintenance arrears’.

Shared knowledge Halliday and Hasan make clear in their discussion of cohesion that reference, substi-

tution and ellipsis all involve presupposition to some degree; they are all devices for identifying something by referring it to something which is already there-known to, or at least recoverable by the hearer (1976, p. 145).

262 SANDRA HARRIS

Because they are dealing mainly with written texts, Halliday and Hasan are more con- cerned with structural presupposition than situational. Yet as they state,

there is always a great deal more evidence available to the hearer for interpreting a sentence than is con- tained in the sentence itself (1976, p. 142).

In order to comprehend fully the nature of threats in a court context, presupposition which is not structural but situational must be taken into account, particularly because it is related to the dimension of explicitness. This kind of presupposition may be desig- nated as a ‘shared knowledge’, to distinguish it from logical presupposition, and it is used by magistrates deliberately to make a threat implicit.

(a) Situational: no previous reference (31) M: I mean there are other alternatives which can be much harsher-than the one we’ve given you

today-and you know this

In this session there has been no previous reference to prison and no previous threat,

and the magistrate explicitly (and you know this) appeals to the defendant’s knowledge of the court context in assuming that he can interpret the ‘alternatives’ as a prison sentence. This is made clear when, after the defendant refutes the magistrate’s notion of ‘harsh- ness’, the magistrate concludes

(32) M: well, if you flatly refuse to accept the order of the Court-there’s only one alternative-then you’ll go to prison

and makes explicit the alternative which he has implicitly called upon the defendant to recognise. The implicit threat also contains an example of substitution (one), but the crucial implicitness is achieved exophorically, with a direct appeal to situational knowl- edge.

Why does the magistrate pose his threat in this way initially? Why not refer to prison directly, as happens in a number of other sessions? The answer also depends on a situ- ational interpretation. This defendant has a history of psychiatric illness and has been a continuing court case with a record of irregular payments of maintenance over a number of years. He has informed the magistrate that he is now employed and has apparently also

settled his domestic arrangements. Presumably the magistrate wishes, if at all possible, to avoid a confrontation with a potentially difficult and disruptive defendant, which an implicit threat is less likely to provoke.

A similar example is the following, involving a different magistrate in another session,

(33) M: do you fully realise what the alternative is to not paying your fines

where again the magistrate calls explicitly upon the defendant’s knowledge of the situ- ation. In this session too there has been no previous threat. This is in fact the only threat in interrogative form, and after the response of the defendant, it is made explicit as the following:

(34) M: we shall suspend this on the basis that you pay one pound each week and every week-first time you fail you won’t come back here-you’ll go straight to Lincoln

This is relevant not only as an example of explicitness but as a further illustration of shared knowledge. The exophoric reference to ‘here’ calls upon the defendant to recognise returning to court for a further session with the magistrate, and the reference to Lincoln assumes the defendant’s knowledge of the location of the prison for remands and short- term sentences. It is also an indication that the defendant is not a first-time offender or a stranger to the court.

FORM AND FUNCTION OF THREATS IN COURT 263

(b) Situational: generalised reference to previous discourse In addition to threats which contain references which are purely situational, there are

those which depend on the situation for their interpretation but which also contain some reference to previous discourse. These threats are situational, because there is no struc- tural indication that anything has been left out or substituted, but the previous discourse becomes an important part of their interpretation.

(35) M: don’t delay on this-because you couldfindyourselfin very serious trouble

Here the directive (and the ‘this’) relate to the making of payments and the implicit consequents refers in a generalised way to two previous mentions of the possibility of a prison sentence. Possibly the meaning of ‘serious trouble’ is recoverable wholly from the situation, but since prison has been mentioned, it seems likely that the magistrate is uttering a threat which refers back to these previous utterances in a generalised way.

A further example, taken from a different magistrate, is the following, (36) M: I can’t say you won’t be dealt with so leniently the next time

What is presupposed here is that the defendant has been dealt with in a lenient way (he has been given a warning rather than a prison sentence) on the present occasion; the magistrate is calling upon the shared knowledge of the defendant in assuming that he accepts this view of leniency, which depends on the discourse which has preceded, in order to interpret the threat of ‘next time’.

There are several forms of reference in the following example: (37) M: you can rest assured-that they will judge very much what their reactions will be to any matter

of outstanding arrears dependent on what your attitude is between now and then

Firstly, there is the exophoric reference ‘now’ and the anaphoric ‘then’, which refers to the previous discourse in which a future date was set for the hearing of the case and the anaphoric ‘they’ which refers to the Bench of the previous utterance. But the situational implicitness depends on the defendant’s recognition that the ‘reactions’ of the Bench are interpretable as the possibility of a prison sentence being imposed and ‘your attitude’ as paying his maintenance regularly during the period between the present and the hearing date. Once again, the ‘meaning’ is recoverable only from the situation, of which the previous discourse forms a significant part.

The use of threats in context Having examined some of the means by which magistrates vary the form of threats, we

turn now to their use in context, the ways in which they combine and for what purpose. Several of these have already been suggested, but one can only take such suggestions further by a closer examination of the discourse context. Also this raises the question of how the form of threats relates to the style or idiolect of particular magistrates and, signifi- cantly, to the response or anticipated response of individual defendants.

As there is a large amount of relevant textual material, I decided to set about this task by examining in more detail the threats issued by two different magistrates in a total of five cases, hence five defendants. For convenience, I shall refer to the magistrates as Magistrate A and Magistrate B and to the defendants by their respective initials. I selected the three defendants dealt with by Magistrate A because they were in many ways very similar in their circumstances and should thus, at least to begin with, enable us to examine the nature of variation with a minimum of other variables. All three defendants (MR, PD

264 SANDRA HARRIS

and SM) are in court for non-payment of fines; all the fines are relatively small amounts, the most (MR) being fifty pounds. Perhaps more important, all three defendants behave co-operatively, even ‘submissively’, and their responses to the magistrate’s threats are minimal acknowledgements, except for SM’s question as to the amount of his fine and his mild attempt to answer the magistrate’s accusation. Also, all the extracts given occur immediately after the magistrates have broken off the session to confer privately and come to a decision regarding the case, and all three defendants are given suspended sentences. Threats are italicized and numbered.

Magistrate A

(1) MR M: well now what the Bench is going to do is going to accept your offer of one pound a week-but

1 give you a suspended sentence of sixty days-do you understand--now this means that if you fail to pay regularly the one pound a week off this fine-you’ll be-visited by the police and taken to prison for sixty days-do you understand

MR: yeh

(further directive)

M: 2

MR:

(2) PD

M:

PD:

M: 2

PD:

now you’ve offered us one pound a week and we’ve accepted it-but to give you a bit of encouragement to pay it-you’ve got this suspended sentence of sixty days-so it’s up to you entirely now

yeh

what the-Bench are of a mind to do-Mr. D is uh make an order to pay these sixteen pounds off at uh fifty pence a week-uh and to give you a bit of encouragement to pay it uh-you’ll be on a suspended sentence of thirty days

yes which means any week you don ‘t pay the fifty pence-the police can pick you up and take you to prison for thirty days-you understand that

yes

(3) SM M: yes-well urn urn there is still this charge that you can find a job while the children are at school

1 -and it’s up to you to look for it-1 don’t think you’ve been very diligent in looking for one at the present time (2) the order stands that you pay it at fifty pence a week-and urn-with a thirty day suspended sentence-thirty-seven day suspended sentence if you don’t-pay -regularly-do you understand

SM: that uh fifty

M: [

pence is that on the nine pounds your worships

that’s fifty

M: on the whole lot-fifty pence you pay off the twelve pounds

SM: yes your worship

M: do you understand that

SM: I-1

M: you pay fifty pence a week off the twelve pounds and any one week you don’tpay thepolice can 2 pick you up and take you to prison for thirty-seven days

SM: yes your worships

M: and there’s no reason why-you can’t diligently or more diligently look for a job and try to pay this off a bit faster-you come to court and offer us three pounds in a fortnight when you’ve not been paying anything at all

SM: no well as I say I’ve got an increase star

[

ting Monday your worship

M: ych

M: 3 well-you’vegot a bit of encouragement topay it now

FORM AND FUNCTION OF THREATS IN COURT 265

Threat 1 in the case of MR follows an initial informing statement and is surrounded by explicit requests for confirmation of understanding. Threat 2 follows a further informa- tive which is a past tense repetition of the initial one, differing from the first threat mainly in being less explicit and in expressing the condition in positive rather than negative form. The pattern of threats in the case of PD is almost the exact reverse. The positive condition becomes negative in the second threat, and it is threat 2 which is the more explicit. Conse- quently, it would seem difficult to draw any generalisations about explicitness in terms of order unless we look closely at the surrounding discourse. In the case of MR the mention of a suspended sentence comes in the informing statement and hence threat 1 is making explicit its meaning (‘now this means’), while in the case of PD the suspended sentence is included in the first threat, so that threat 2 becomes the means of making it explicit (‘which means that’). Hence the discourse context provides at least a partial answer.

The case of SM provides us with a further variation. Here we have three repetitions. As with PD, the suspended sentence is included in threat 1, which is then made explicit and elaborated in threat 2. There is also variation both in terms of negative and positive elements and reversal of condition-consequents in the proposition. Threat 2 is followed by an accusation that SM is not really trying to get employment and, by implication, that he has been unwilling rather than unable to pay his fine; and threat 3 is in response to SM’s attempted explanation. It is the least explicit, in that ‘it’ relates back to the fifty pence a week, and the ‘bit of encouragement’ alludes to the suspended sentence that SM has just been given.

Thus, in terms of threats, we have the following pattern of degree of explicitness:

MR PD 1 more explicit 1 less explicit 2 less explicit 2 more explicit

SM 1 less explicit

2 more explicit 3 least explicit

Moreover, there are similarities in the lexical items selected to express the basic propo- sition. Apart from standard legal terms, such as ‘suspended sentence’, which are common to all magistrates, Magistrate A mentions the police to all three defendants as the Actors who will ‘pick up’ the defendant in two cases and ‘visit’ her in the other; in all three cases, the defendant will be ‘taken to prison’. In all three cases the defendant is to be given ‘a bit of encouragement’ by the suspended sentence. In the case of SM, the reference is anaphoric; in that of PD and MR it is cataphoric. There is also the inevitable question relating to the defendant’s understanding, which has already been mentioned, and the explicit reference to meaning.

In summary, then, one can say that these three sessions of Magistrate A all involve variance of form in repeated threats, and that variation can be described in certain general ways. Moreover, even though the same magistrate is the speaker and the defendants are in very similar circumstances, there are also differences in variation between the individual sessions, and these differences can be viewed-not at this juncture fully explained-only from the perspective of discourse and situational constraints.

However, to make this point more clearly and to consider also the extent to which a particular magistrate expresses himself in particular ways, we may find it useful to consider a session involving a similar defendant but a different magistrate.

266 SANDRA HARRIS

Magistrate B

(1) MB M: this has gone on too long Mr. B-we’re going to sentence you to ninety days imprisonment (2)

1 we’re suspending it for-as long as you continue to pay the money that you owe-at the rate of ten pounds a week

MB: yeh

M: starting-as soon as you get your next pay packet (further discussion concerning employment)

M: well if you pay it off more quickly it’s to your advantage-but the court order is-ten pounds a 2 week and this is your very last chance-if for any reason it’s not paid-you don’t have to come

back to court-thepolice come and-uh remove you straight toprison-it’s as simple as that (further discussion concerning Court order)

M: urn-you’ve got to uh-that’s up to you and we’re giving you ten days-so you want to get it off as soon as you get it on Thursday

MB: yeh

M: and every other Thursday-you see

MB: 1’11 try to get it off straightaway Thursday

M: 3 well it’s up to you-you know what the alternative is

MB: yeh

MB is also a defendant who has failed to pay a fine, and like MR, PD and SM, he is given a suspended sentence. He too behaves in a co-operative and submissive fashion and does not question, as does the next defendant (KH), the justness of his fine. Negative and positive elements are reversed in the conditions of threats 1 and 2, and there is also a reversal of condition-consequents order. Reference is present in all three threats, (it, what), and there are varying degrees of explicitness. In the first threat, the condition is made explicit by means of elaboration, and in the second threat, the consequents makes explicit the meaning of the suspended sentence of threat 1 and elaborates it. Threat 3 calls upon the defendant’s shared knowledge of the courtroom situation (you know) and makes implicit reference (what the alternative is) to previous discourse, which has made explicit the ‘alternative’ which the defendant ‘knows’.

However, although the basic means of variance are similar to Magistrate A’s, Magistrate B selects a slightly different range of lexical items to express the same proposition. It would be foolhardy to over-generalise on the basis of such small pieces of data. Clearly, even the same magistrate will select different lexical items on different occasions, but the difference between MB and any one of the other three (MR, PD, SM) are greater than differences among the latter. Hence the style of the magistrate is a contributing factor, and an examination of the other three magistrates bears this out.7

A further influencing factor on threats as issued by magistrates is the response of the defendant. In all of the cases examined so far, the defendants respond minimally and submissively. What happens when a defendant challenges a magistrate? Does this affect the way in which the latter uses threats? The following is an extract from such a defendant, and the speaker is again Magistrate B.

Magistrate B

(2) KH M: well you hear what the clerk says-as far as the Court’s concerned Mr. H. you left it too late (2)

1 and so urn (2) we-there’s a non-payment of fine and we shall have to-unless you can make an 2 offer to the Court today-as to how you’re going to pay this we shall have to think of other

methods for dealing with the situation (2) are you prepared to make an offer of payment-we -would be prepared to listen to-a weekly payment (2) to get rid of this matter

KH:

M:

M: 3

KH:

KH:

M:

KH:

M: 4

KH:

KH: M:

M: 5

KH:

FORM AND FUNCTION OF THREATS IN COURT 267

I don’t think it-it’s a-matter-just of payment-it’s a matter of justice

Hmmm (further discussion and a conference among Magistrates)

You’re not prepared to make the Court an offer-ofpayment (2) because I think I should tell you that the alfernative is going to prison Mr. H

II IfIdo

fair enough-if I do I’m condoning injustice-which I think it was in the first place (further discussion)

hmmm-we can’t retry the case I’m afraid

so I’ve got to pay it-and accept injustice

yes-well it’s up to you-Isay th 4

alternative could very well be prison which says a lot for

which says a lot for British justice hmmm

(after a long discussion, KH is ordered to pay at three pounds a week)

I think you should real&e that if you don ‘t pay this fine off at three pounds a week-you’ll be brought back here and uh the chances are that you’ll go to prison for ninety days

there’s fifty pounds here (KH takes envelope out of his pocket and throws it down)

Like the others, this defendant has been fined (motoring offence) but, unlike the others, he has lost his job because of the fine, which he feels very strongly to have been unjust. He states that he left the matter in the hands of his solicitor in order to appeal, but he is informed by the clerk that the time for appeals has now elapsed and that such a course is no longer possible; he must pay the fine. His anger and bitterness are apparent both to the magistrate and to me. Hence the placing and form of the first threat is somewhat different from the previous cases. Firstly, threat 2 is a re-phrasing of threat 1, which poses the condition as an existence statement (‘there’s a non-payment of fine’). Magistrate B breaks off in the consequents and re-phrases the existence statement as a clear conditional (‘unless you can make an offer to the court today-as to how you’re going to pay this’).

Secondly, the condition is not directly for payment but for an offer of a specific amount. A number of defendants are asked to make offers of payment, but these requests do not usually include a threat, as this one does. Presumably the magistrate is responding to the fact that KH is likely to be disruptive by threatening him at an early stage but also seeks to avoid a direct confrontation by making that threat an implicit one (‘we shall have to think of other methods for dealing with the situation’). When KH does not make an offer but rather questions the system of justice, the ‘other methods’ are made explicit in threat 3 as ‘going to prison’. The conditional is expressed as a declarative, and the conse- quents repeated in threat 4, with a shift in modality and in stress. It is interesting to note that ‘should tell’ becomes ‘say’, and ‘is’ is repeated as ‘could be’, suggesting a further means of variance. The shift in stress from ‘alternative’ and ‘should’ to ‘very’ actually intensifies the threat. Threat 5 comes after KH has been ordered to pay the fine at three pounds a week and is the most explicit in both the condition and the consequents, which are elaborated, and expressed in the more usual form of a negative ‘if’ conditional clause followed by a positive consequents.

In summary, then, the number of repetitions is clearly higher when the defendant responds by challenging the magistrate’s assertions, and the threat more obviously used as a means of control, of forcing the defendant to do what is requested. The magistrate responds to the challenge of the defendant with a threat, and ‘prison’ is repeated on three

268 SANDRA HARRIS

occasions, whereas in the other sessions it occurred only once. In addition, the way in which the threats are ‘framed’ by reference to linguistic and mental processes seems related to the defendant’s responses, as in the case of MB the same magistrate makes no explicit references to either. The burden of the mental process involved is shifted from the magistrate (‘I think I should tell you’) to the defendant in the final threat (‘I think you should realise’). In fact, these framing references to linguistic and mental processes seem to be selected by Magistrate B deliberately so as to avoid calling on the shared knowledge of the defendant. The magistrate’s references seem to aim at distancing the defendant by assuming that he does not know what will happen to him if he fails to pay his fine, even after he has been told, that he has no shared knowledge of the situation. Since KH has repeatedly appealed to the magistrate in a personal sense and attempted to draw him into an argument, these framing devices serve both to emphasise the threat and the magistrate’s resistance to involvement.

As was mentioned earlier, since it is unlikely that Magistrate B repeats his threat because he thinks that KH has not heard, the repetitions must serve another purpose. Hence they act as a means of control, both over behaviour (to force KH to pay) and over discourse (to shift the topic from justice to punishment and the court’s power to impose it). In both these senses, the threat apparently brings about the desired effect, as the fifty pounds is paid and the discourse brought to an end with no further challenges. However, the ultimate ‘success’ of a threat may be much more difficult to measure and has impli- cations beyond its immediate consequences. This is the only case in which the fine is actually paid during the court session. Whether the other defendants who were also threatened eventually paid their fines could only be ascertained by examining the court records and is in any case irrelevant to the discourse.

Conclusions Thus the examination of various theoretical approaches to threats in conjunction with

recorded evidence exemplifying their use in court discourse suggests the following con- clusions:

1. that the variance in the surface syntax of threats is considerable even when the context and the underlying proposition are held constant, suggesting a complexity of form which any theoretical analysis must take into account; and

2. that variance in the surface form of repeated threats serves clear functional purposes as it is used by British magistrates in this court and follows certain discernible patterns. Moreover, as Halliday suggests,

the options in meaning arc significant linguistically because selections in grammar and vocabulary can be explained as a realization of them. They are significant sociologically because they provide insight into patterns of behaviour that are in turn explainable as realizations of the pragmatic and symbolic acts that are the expression of the social structure (1973, p. 64).

A threat becomes in this context just such a ‘pragmatic and symbolic act’; pragmatic in attempting to bring about a particular act or series of acts and symbolic of the power and control of the court system and ultimately the social structure. Though the context is fairly limited, it is a crucial one to a very large number of real people. Consequently, examining the nature of threats and their variance in form is not merely an exercise in linguistic analysis but may also enable us to perceive certain patterns of social behaviour in Halliday’s sense. Though I have explored only a small area and that somewhat

FORM AND FUNCTION OF THREATS IN COURT 269

tentatively, the complexity of the dynamic and continuing relationship between linguistic form, function and situation has been made clearly manifest.

NOTES

1 The data base is a series of audio-recordings and transcriptions made over a period of six months in the Arrears and Maintenance division of the Nottinghamshire County Magistrates’ Courts, the lowest courts in the British system. The Bench is usually comprised of three magistrates, one of whom acts as the chairman. Only the chairman is permitted to speak in court, though the remaining members of the Bench may and do confer sotto vote with the chairman magistrate. They do not, however, engage in courtroom interaction, thought they do take part in any private conferences held with the clerk during the court recess and thus participate in the decision-making process. The recordings include the sessions of five different magistrates-one woman and four men-each of whom is acting as chairman of the Bench. The cases of twenty-six defendants were involved.

Defendants in this court usually have low economic and social status and are most often present because they have failed to comply with a decision of a previous court; they have either failed altogether to pay their fines/ maintenance or, more often, they have not been paying regularly and are in arrears. Consequently, the common goal-oriented task of all cases is the decision as to how much the defendant should pay each week or, exception- ally, the imposition of a prison sentence.

2Austin does regard ‘threaten’ as a performative verb. ‘We can use the performative ‘I warn you that’ but not ‘I convince you that’ and can use the performative ‘I threaten you with’ but not ‘I intimidate you by’; convincing and intimidating are perlocutionary acts’ (1962, p. 130). However, the status of ‘threaten’ as a performative does seem open to question. For example, though ‘I threaten you’ seems unacceptable, both ‘are you threatening me?’ and ‘I’m not threatening you’ or even ‘I’m threatening you (with dismissal)’ seem much more so.

3Fillenbaum (1977) also takes speech act theory as his starting point in an article on ‘plausible inducements’ and considers both conditional promises and conditional threats as types of requests. Although he goes on to discuss the negative and positive ‘signing’ of threats in terms of their relative undesirability for the hearer, Fillenbaum’s scheme is of limited use in a pragmatic analysis of threats, largely because he does not attempt to relate his relative values either to semantic categories or to syntactic forms.

4 It seems to be widely believed by magistrates and perhaps by the public that defendants are largely mystified by what goes on in court. Carlen (1976) writes as follows concerning defendants’ lack of comprehension:

Understanding, or feigning understanding, is absolutely insisted on in a magistrates’ court. The clerk, having read out sentences which are often grammatically and substantively unrecognisable as offshoots of the English language, invariably says, ‘Do you understand?’ Seldom is it that defendants deny compre- hension whilst they are in court. Outside the court, however, they will ‘stand back’ from their court experiences and theorise about their silence . . . Usually they stand silent until the combined glances of magistrate, clerk and warrant officer seem to provoke them into saying ‘Yes’. A few defendants, of course, deny comprehension. Sometimes, their ‘understanding’ is enforced by a threat; more often, the trial proceeds on an assumption, rather than an assurance, of their understanding (1976, p. 109).

My own observation in the more limited context of the Arrears and Maintenance Court is quite different from this. Perhaps because this is one court in which solicitors, the police and others are only occasionally involved and the discourse is usually between the defendant and the magistrate or the defendant and the clerk, there was little explicitly legal language as Carlen describes it. Although defendants frequently displayed their failure to understand legalprocedure, such as the time limit set for appeals and the way to go about appealing, the actual discourse in court seemed to present few problems of this kind. Certainly there was an insistence upon acceptance and especially confirmation of court information, but I had no feeling that defendants went away not knowing what had happened to them. On the contrary, I felt that defendants were only too aware of their own failure to pay and the accusations and threats which were levelled against them. More often, it was the magistrate who failed to hear correctly or who got defendants’ names and addresses wrong or made errors concerning the sum of payment due.

SThough in Searle’s sense the propositional content of these two sentences differs, in context they are in fact synonymous. Both function as conditional threats; the payment in the second example also refers to a fine and ‘hearing more of this’ refers to being brought back to court and ultimately sent to prison for non-payment.

61 have found Halliday and Hasan’s work on cohesion useful in this regard and have adopted their terminology, e.g. reference, substitution, ellipsis.

‘For example, one of the other magistrates (who happens also to be a headmaster) utters the following threat:

M: and if you have not done that by the 6th of August a prison sentence suspended-over you in this instance of forty-two days will come down upon your shoulders for your non-payment of your wife and child maintenance

270 SANDRA HARRIS

Making explicit the meaning of a suspended sentence by means of a spatial metaphor (presumably derived from the associated meaning of the word) is, as one might suppose, peculiar to this magistrate. The metaphor is used twice in a similar context, and it is also this magistrate who consistently refers to the clerk of court as ‘the learned clerk’, unlike the others who call him either Mr. Clerk or, more often, by his name, i.e. Mr. Jones.

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APPENDIX

Number of Defendant Amount due Offence Threat Magistrate

repetitions (0

2 MR 50 Traffic offence

2 PD 9 Fine (?)

3 SM 12 Dog license and theft

3 RA Maintenance

5 EB Maintenance

3 GG 141

4 DS 84

Criminal damage

Theft and poaching

4 DH 90 Traffic offence

6 MW Maintenance

3

2

1

1

3

5

3

50

WM 9 Traffic offence

JF Maintenance

PP 44 Theft

MW 26 Rate arrears

MB 100 Compensation

KH 50 Traffic offence

GA Maintenance

Prison, suspended sentence

Prison, suspended sentence

Prison, suspended sentence

Prison, taken to prison

Prison, suspended sentence

Being brought back to Court

Being brought back to Court, mention of prison

Being brought back to Court, mention of prison

Prison, suspended sentence

Prison, suspended sentence

Adjourned, mention of prison

Adjourned, mention of trouble

Being brought back to Court

Prison, suspended sentence

Being brought back to Court, mention of prison

Adjourned, mention of prison

1

1

1

1

2

2

2

3

3

4

4

4

5

5

5

5