Forensic Interactions. Power and (il)literacy in Spanish Courtroom Trials

Starting from the theoretical assumptions of the Forensic Linguistics and Communication, the present work aims to analyse how inequalities emerge in Spanish courtroom trials. The data presented have been extracted from the corpus of forensic oral communication (COrAL, Mariottini forthcoming), whose current extension is 22 hours and 53 minutes, videotaped and transcribed by the CA transcription method (Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson 1974), adapted for the Spanish language by Val.Es.Co. (Briz and Val.Es.Co. 2002). In the discussion, special attention is paid to the form in which unequal knowledge among participants emerges and I refer to as the category of (il)literacy.