..."and I’m telling you honestly, I don’t measure" : emotive reframing and evasiveness in expert testimony

This chapter considers patterns of evasive behaviour in expert testimony with regard to medical evidence in a criminal trial. Building on earlier work on emotive communication, it explains how linguistic avoidance is realised in the cross-examination of expert witnesses, in addition to identifying differences between the testimony of a cooperative witness and that of an uncooperative witness. In the analysis, avoidance is considered in relation to six dimensions:certainty, volitionality, proximity, evaluation, specificity, as well as size/degree/quantity. The chapter argues that expert witnesses’avoidance of full epistemic commitment to uncomfortable concepts and/or propositions–similarly to stress responses to perceived or real danger in the physical environment–can be conceptualised not only as withdrawal(“flight”mode) but also, in the case of combative witnesses, as approach("fight"mode).