Papilota-Diaz 63 the recipient to produce a responsive turn which may come in verbal replies or actions. To some extent, the grammatical forms of questions put constraints on the forms of answers that are relevant and expectable. However, participants can choose to design responses to questions in ways that do not conform to the grammatical form of the question. For example, when participants disagree with a presupposition (background information shared by the participants in a conversation and their implicit understanding) embedded in a yes/no question, and providing either a yes or no answer would imply agreement with the presupposition, participants can choose to give a non-type-conforming answer that displays that the question is in some way problematic (Raymond 2010, 88). In the context of the rape trial proceedings, cross examining lawyers design their questions so as to commit cross-examined witnesses to descriptions of events compatible with those put forth by their own clients (Atkinson and Drew 1979 in Freed and Ehrlich 2010, 8). They deliver their questions that keep some aspects of the witness’s version of events, while reformulating versions of other aspects of the events so that crucial features of their or their client’s version of events are retained. In fact, by soliciting information from a witness, they transform versions of events to serve their own client’s case (Drew and Heritage, 1992). A similar observation is prevalent in the extract that follows. According to Gibbons (2003, 118), one of the aims of lawyers who repeat their own questions is to produce some inconsistency between replies to the same question which can be used to discredit a witness. Furthermore, repetition can also serve to put pressure on the witness and highlight the lawyer’s disbelief to the answer, or a particular element in the testimony. However in Extract 1 below, repetition is not only used to emphasize elements of testimony which may promote inconsistency in a complainant’s claim of truth, but it is also used to project an information of an earlier event to a later event of the alleged rape; that is, in the course of the cross examination, an aspect of information of an earlier event is retained in the defense lawyer’s version of a different and ensuing event of rape. This phrasal self-repetition is strategically devised by the

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