Proceedings of the Tenth International Workshop on Health Text Mining and Information Analysis (LOUHI 2019)

International audienc

“Them without the capital get the punishment”: A rhetorical move analysis of death row final statements and their structural, grammatical, and pragmatic features

Linguistic research that focuses on the last words of death row inmates typically concludes that there is a systematic pattern of language use among the final statements (e.g., Schuck & Ward, 2008). Building on that point, this thesis analyses final statements made by prisoners primarily on death row in the US from a mixed-framework approach. Starting with an English for Specific Purposes (ESP) perspective (Swales, 1990), I describe the function of rhetorical “moves” and their individual steps by combining knowledge from the fields of Systemic Functional Linguistics and Speech Act Theory. This approach allows for a detailed analysis of final statements which fuses together three different elements: the structural, grammatical, and pragmatic. The final statements compiled within this study – nearly 500 – have been examined using rhetorical move/step analysis (Illie, 2006; Swales, 1990), which allows investigation of discourse as functional units of text which each serve a communicative purpose, or “move”. In this paper, I argue that the overall communicative purpose of final statements is for inmates to gain control and define the situation they are in. In the majority of texts from the primary corpus I compiled, inmates achieve this by including one or more of five core moves: apologising to others, expressing love, making a religious reference, thanking, and providing instructions. In a previous pilot study (Jackson, 2017), I identify a range of communicative purposes for this genre. This research expands on and re-evaluates that earlier work, highlighting the sociocultural factors of the final statement authors; addressing the lack of genre-analysis-based studies of final statements themselves; identifying limitations in a single-method framework; and providing suggested solutions. Furthermore, the move-based account put forth in this study contributes to the multi-disciplinary fields of discourse studies by examining a unique ‘lay’ genre beyond the usual scope of professional and academic text