Language and material conduct in legal discourse

Since the groundbreaking works of Atkinson and Drew () and O'Barr () the field of language and law (sometimes called forensic linguistics') has developed at an accelerating pace to become a major subfield in sociolinguistics as well as neighboring disciplines. A wealth of research has revealed the complex dimensions of power and ideology in both written and verbal modes of legal discourse and how the law is indeed a law of words' (Tiersma ). Rather than being the passive vehicle for the imposition of law, language actively channels our interpretation of evidence, statutes and credibility into distinct strands of legal relevance. But the law is more than just words' and here I demonstrate in vivid detail how the integration of language and material conduct like artifacts, audio-recordings and transcripts figure in the production of legal reality. Using a lengthy extract from a criminal trial, I illuminate how language and material conduct reflexively animate one another and other visual resources. In so doing, I show how disparate streams of multimodal resources converge in an incremental build-up of suspense and intertextual escalation of evidence that circulate around a key moment of legal discourse.