Magda Serwadczak

• Doctoral defence: 17 January 2025, 1 p.m.
  
• VUB Campus Etterbeek, I.0.01
• Supervisors: Rik Vosters (VUB) and Mieke Vandenbroucke (UAntwerp)
• ​ Register by emailing magda.serwadczak@vub.be
  

Abstract

The transcription of spoken language into written records is a common practice in institutional record-keeping. In criminal cases, spoken statements delivered by witnesses and suspects are committed to paper by law enforcement officers and courtroom officials, and are subsequently used as part of bureaucratic routines. However, a growing body of scholarly examinations highlights that this transcription process substantialy alters the original oral narratives, raising questions about the accuracy of written institutional records in reflecting prior spoken communication.

This dissertation examines the relationship between speech and writing in 18th- and 19th-century criminal records from Bruges, Belgium. These sources are particularly promising to historical, socially oriented linguistic research, as they could potentially offer novel insights into linguistic behavior of a wide cross-section of the Early Modern and Late Modern Flemish society. Employing an integrative methodological paradigm grounded in historical sociolinguistics and historical pragmatics, the study combines large-scale quantitative corpus analysis with more fine-grained, discourse-analytic approaches. Four focus areas, corresponding to four empirical case studies, address key challenges in the transcription of speech into writing within the formalized context of criminal procedures. The first case study uses the linguistic markers of orality and literacy to determine how (conceptually) spoken or written the texts in the corpus are, and if linguistic features associated with spoken language are entirely filtered out by the transcription process. In the second case study, the processes of entextualization are examined, by comparing multiple depositions delivered by the same speaker at different stages of the case’s proceedings. The findings shed more light on the transformations occurring in deponents’ narratives as they travel across the legal procedure. The third case study focuses on the different strategies of speech reporting, exploring the role of the scribe in committing spoken narratives to paper. Finally, the fourth case study delves into the discursive construction of a criminal case in writing, focusing specifically on the role of legal and socio-cultural paradigms in translating what happened in the court into a piece of institutional documentation.

Findings indicate that historical criminal records are fundamentally shaped by the institutional context in which they were produced, reflecting contemporaneous bureaucratic practices more than actual speech events. Nevertheless, they offer critical insights into past institutional communication and the processes that shaped administrative record-keeping. This research underscores the utility of such documents for historical sociolinguistic and pragmatic studies, despite their inherent limitations in capturing spoken interactions.