Courtroom Questioning of a Witness

This page gives access to the DMT analysis of one dialogue, described in the table at the bottom of the page. Click on items to view the analysis.

Situation: Terry Nichols is on trial as part of the Oklahoma bombing trials. A witness is being questioned officially in the presence of a judge and jury.

Participants: Mr. Thurschwell is a lawyer for the defense. Mrs. Walsh, the witness, identifies herself in the dialogue.

Web Access to the Source: http://www.courttv.com/casefiles/oklahoma/nichtranscripts/010298pm.html . The dialogue is presented in its entirety, but it is extracted from a file containing other information.

Features of this dialogue: This is the only dialogue of the DMT starter set that seems to justify partial analysis.

Courtroom dialogue of this sort is highly constrained. Some of the constraints come from law, some from long established tradition, some from the judge and the lawyer. The result is a very clear, rigid production in which the witness simply answers the questions given. The effective context consists almost entirely of the prior questions and answers. (There are other legal proceedings, such as discovery depositions, that lead to more natural dialogue.)

In this dialogue, in DMT terms, every odd numbered turn bids the Information Seeking Macrogame. In every even numbered turn, the witness accepts the bid of Information Seeking, answers the question and implicitly bids termination of the game for that question. Starting at turn 3, every odd numbered turn also accepts termination of the previous game. Turns 68 and 76 appear to be overlapped speech, in each case the word "Yes."

The full dialogue and an abridged version of the analysis are available below.

Symbol	PDF file	Transcript, Symbolic and Graphic Analysis in Spreadsheet for download and manipulation
Witness1 -- the abridged analysis	Click for pdf.	Click for spreadsheet.
Witness1 -- the full dialogue, without analysis	Click for pdf.	Click for spreadsheet.

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