TRANSITIVITY, no stone left unturned: Introducing flexibility and granularity into the framework for the analysis of courtroom discourse draws on a combination of four main areas in Applied Linguistics, namely Critical Discourse Analysis, Corpus Linguistics, Forensic Linguistics (FL) and Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). With origins in SFL, this thesis provides a critique of two existing transitivity models (Halliday 1985, 1994; Halliday & Matthiessen 2004, 2013; Fawcett 1987, 2000; Neale 2002) that are used for the purposes of analysing language use in context and, more specifically, here we examine the language used inside the courtroom. The courtroom transcripts concern a criminal case in which a man found himself wrongfully convicted of raping a minor. We probe into this type of data with the aim of unearthing the language patterns employed by certain individuals (i.e. the lawyers and the victim in the case) as a means to reveal how their questions and/or testimony is most likely what led to a guilty verdict, despite evidence seeming to suggest otherwise. An analysis of the language patterns in the court case, thus, not only served to reveal the power behind language and how, in this instance, it can lead to societal injustice, but equally it enabled modifications to be made to the current transitivity models and, as such, contribute to theoretical advances in the field of SFL. In addition to the latter, another well-known SFL framework (Appraisal theory, Martin & White 2005; Bednarek 2008) was also employed for the purposes of gaining further insights into the types of evaluation present in the closing arguments given by each of the lawyers involved in the case and, consequently, uncover how the use of both explicit and implicit evaluation in their discourse, although primarily the latter, is likely to have impacted the outcome of the trial. Overall, the intention behind this piece of research was, at a more theoretical level, to contribute to the current shortage of SFL research in the field of Forensic Linguistics and, at a more practical level, draw attention to the issue of wrongful convictions in society in an attempt to reduce or even eradicate such injustices.

Bartley, L.V. (2019). For the many, not the few: A transitivity analysis of Labour’s 2017 manifesto as a driving force for promoting a populist Britain. En E. Hidalgo Tenorio, M.A. Benitez Castro y F. De Cesare (Ed.) Populist Discourse: Critical Approaches to Contemporary Politics (pp. 136- 151). London: Routledge.

Bartley, L.V. (2018a). Putting Transitivity to the test: A review of the Sydney and Cardiff models. Functional Linguistics 5(1): 1-21.

Bartley, L.V. (2018b). “Justice demands that you find this man not guilty”: A transitivity analysis of the closing arguments of a rape case that resulted in a wrongful conviction. International Journal of Applied Linguistics 28(3): 480-495.