TRUE Researchers Attend ILLA 2025

TRUE team members Rebecca Jenkins (PhD student) and Prof Nuria Lorenzo-Dus (Linguistics Researcher and PhD Co-Supervisor) recently presented their research at the 7th ILLA General Conference: Language and Law in an Age of Uncertainty and Transition, held in Kaunas, Lithuania, from 3–5 September 2025.

Rebecca and Nuria co-presented their research in the 'Language and Power in the Courtroom' session. Their presentation, “Maybe we start by just a show of hands”: a genre approach to jury deliberation and interpretation of judicial directions, shared findings from two studies, which analysed how jury deliberations (as a linguistic genre) can be understood as a continuum of autonomy and instruction following. The researchers explained how this can be realised via (im)politeness theory (through an analysis of challenging), narrative analysis (through storytelling), stance analysis (through knowledge assertions), and misunderstandings of judicial instructions. They demonstrated how these combined linguistic approaches led to a framework that can provide insights into the intra-group dynamics of jury deliberations, as well as the interactional roles of jurors.

Both researchers had a fantastic time at the conference and in Kaunas: giving and receiving feedback on research, connecting with fellow linguistics researchers, and inviting researchers to participate in TRUE's upcoming interdisciplinary workshop: The Courtroom as a Linguistic Arena: Language, Law, and the Pursuit of Justice in Criminal Trials.