The Kercher/Knox trial: accommodation strategies in a bilingual setting

In the last few years, in the picturesque Umbrian city of Perugia, Meredit Kercher’s slaughter has spawned one of Italy’s most sensational and closely watched trials. In November 2007 Meredith’s roommate, Amanda Knox of Seattle (U.S.), was charged along with her Italian ex-boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, with murdering Kercher in a drug-fuelled sexual assault, and in December 2009, they were sentenced to 26 and 25 years respectively. Their convictions were overturned on appeal in October 2011 by a panel of six lay jurors and two judges. However, Amanda Knox was also given a three-year sentence for slander after falsely accusing Patrick Lumumba, the owner of a Perugia bar where she worked, of involvement in the killing. In this study we foregrounded a phase of this slander trial, and in particular one segment of relevant linguistic interest. The bilingual setting of such a trial, the defendant’s (Amanda Knox) occasional language switching (from Italian into English and vice versa), and the legal professionals’, interpreter’s and defendant’s accommodative strategies were analysed in socio-psychological perspective. In a broad Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) approach, such strategies have been identified and described under the Communication Accommodation Theory (CAT) purview. One of the most prominent frameworks in the social psychology of language, CAT is applicable to a wide array of contexts, forensic exchanges among them. Essentially, CAT assumes that interactants use strategic behaviours (convergent, divergent, or maintenance), mainly based on language and communication, to negotiate social distance between themselves and others and/or to maintain perceived separation or nearness with interlocutors. Convergent accommodation strategies can be enacted either to convey empathy, develop a closer relationship, signal common social identities, or to elicit the other’s approval, trust and, also, to enhance cooperation or defuse a potentially volatile situation. Divergent strategies, in contrast, seek to emphasize identity differences and detachment. Our study aimed at analyzing samples from a phase of Amanda Knox trial. A major focus was on evaluating the cohesion between the coerciveness of the prosecutor’s questions and the pertinence of Amanda’s answers.