Claridge 2019 Drinking and Crime - Negotiating Intoxication in Courtroom Discourse 1720 To 1913

chapter 11
Drinking and crime

Negotiating intoxication in courtroom discourse,
1720 to 1913
Claudia Claridge
University of Augsburg
This chapter investigates how drunkenness is presented during criminal

proceedings in courtroom speech by focusing on words meaning ‘drunk’. A wide
range of drunken terms are used by all courtroom participants, which differ in
force, euphemistic potential and style, and are thus employed to negotiate degrees
of drunkenness in the interaction between legal professionals and lay participants.
Fairly common amplification and rarer downtoning of these terms also contribute
to their use in courtroom argumentation. The referents of drunkenness
expressions are most often third persons, rarely the addressee, but fairly
commonly also the speakers themselves. Victims and defendants often attribute
drunkenness to themselves, apparently presenting it as a mitigating factor in the
context of the crime. In contrast, the insistent questioning on that topic and the
frequent usage of drunk terms by judges speaks for a more negative assessment of
Copyright © 2019. John Benjamins Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
drunkenness by professionals.
Keywords: drunkenness, face, (im)politeness, intensification, mitigation,

reference target
1. Introduction
A case of alleged bigamy treated at the Old Bailey courthouse in London ended
with the following exchange between a legal counsel and a defendant (prisoner):
(1) Prisoner. I never had but one Husband, and that’s Woodward.
C(ounsel). But here’s Hall that says he was Father, when you was Married at
the Barber’s Shop.
Prisoner. I’m sure if I was, I was so much in Liquor, that I remember nothing
about it.
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.91.11cla
© 2019 John Benjamins Publishing Company
Fanego, T., & Rodríguez-Puente, P. (Eds.). (2019). Corpus-based research on variation in english legal discourse. John
Benjamins Publishing Company.
Created from dalarna on 2022-11-30 09:27:31.
 Claudia Claridge
Q. Why don’t you remember you was at the Barber’s Shop, − the Hand and
Pen.
Prisoner. No; I was very Drunk.
C. Drunkenness is no Excuse in Law, for any Crime.1 (t17370907–15)
While the defendant pleaded ignorance and potential non-responsibility regarding

the crime due to her intoxication, the counsel rebutted this on the general principle
that drunkenness does not classify as an extenuating circumstance. The jury never-
theless acquitted the defendant, but left open the reason, that is, whether the jury only
saw too little proof provided in this short trial or perhaps indeed regarded drunken-
ness as an “excuse”. Thus, different attitudes towards drinking and drunkenness may
have clashed with each other not only in society at large, but also in the courtroom, in
particular between legal professionals and lay participants (Wiener 1999). Moreover,
attitudes towards drink were fluctuating and changing in the Late Modern period,
from, in general, greater lenience in the eighteenth century towards more (official)
strictness in the nineteenth century (Clark 1983). Alcohol consumption meanwhile
was a normal part of life, thus providing ample opportunity for intoxication to arise
and to also become an issue in the context of criminal proceedings.
The aim of this chapter is therefore to investigate how drunkenness was pre-
sented and negotiated in courtroom discourse. Apart from responsibility and cul-
pability, also the integrity and credibility of courtroom interlocutors may be at
stake. The focus is thus first on who uses drunkenness expressions and who is the
referent of the expression, for example, a lawyer about a witness, or victims about
themselves. Secondly, the manner of expression will be investigated, with atten-
tion paid to the forcefulness of expression, through word choice (tipsy vs boozed
vs merry) or through degree features as in much in liquor and very drunk in the
example above. It may be assumed defendants and victims, especially when speak-
ing about themselves, may rather use mitigating expressions.
The structure of the chapter is as follows: after a short historical overview
of drinking, intoxication and criminal proceedings (Section 2) and an explica-
tion of the courtroom data and methodological approaches (Section 3), the results
regarding users, referents, and expression will be presented in Section 4.
2. Alcohol consumption, attitudes, and crime
There was ample opportunity and even necessity for the consumption of alcohol
in the period under investigation: beer of different strengths, cider, wine, and
. Quotes from the Old Bailey Corpus (OBC) follow the pattern t-year-month-day-identifier,
here: t-September 7, 1737–15.
Chapter 11. Negotiating intoxication in courtroom discourse 
spirits were widely available in inns, taverns, alehouses, pubs, and gin shops (as
well as off premises), whereas clean water or affordable non-alcoholic choices
constituted a problem (Clark 1983; Jennings 2007). Maitland’s history of Lon-
don (1739) listed the astounding number of 15,839 drinking establishments for
the 1730s, including 5,975 alehouses and 8,659 brandy shops (Jennings 2007: 55,
23, 34). Also, before the mid to late nineteenth century drinking houses were
often the only recreational leisure options (Greenaway 2003: 7); most social
and a considerable amount of economic activity centred on them (Clark 1983:
230–231; Jennings 2007: 39). While drinking establishments attracted all social
classes in the eighteenth century, they became more clearly the refuge of the
working classes in the nineteenth century (Jennings 2007: 109). Industrialization
and urbanization played a role for drinking, too, as the often wretched condi-
tions and sometimes ready income generated by them encouraged drinking as
a response (Greenaway 2003: 7). Some workers were even paid in beer until the
outlawing of this practice in 1887 or provided with it during work: Benjamin
Franklin described the consumption of seven pints a day of a printing worker in
the 1720s (Clark 1983: 213; Yeomans 2014: 7). Alcohol also encroached on work
in the practice of ‘Saint Monday’, with workers extending the weekend for further
drinking (Yeomans 2014: 3). The average consumption of a labourer in the 1730s
may have been two quarts of beer a day and although beer consumption declined
thereafter, that of spirits rose and soared especially after 1820 (Clark 1983: 209,
292, 295, 298). The cost of alcohol came to 15 per cent of all working-class house-
hold expenditure in the 1870s (Wiener 1990: 188). Regardless of consumption
figures, the Beer Act of 1830, abolishing the licencing for beer-selling, seems to
have increased the incidence of public drunkenness very noticeably (Yeomans
2014: 8, 35; Jennings 2007: 63).

While alcohol remained a constant fact of life throughout the period, atti-
tudes toward it changed considerably. In the eighteenth century, as in the centu-
ries before, drinking alcohol was usually not a cause for moral or other concern
(Yeomans 2014: 36, 40). The first exception to this occurred in the gin panics in
the first half of the eighteenth century, which were connected to keeping up public
order (Yeomans 2014: 7). Although tolerant attitudes survived into and through
the nineteenth century, a strong counter current appeared with the Victorian
temperance movement. Before the nineteenth century, drinking was not neces-
sarily considered as immoral in itself, but might lead to immoral actions, such as
“deceitful Bargains, firing of Houses” in the words of the Athenian News in 1710
(Yeomans 2014: 44). In the nineteenth century drinking became redefined as
immoral in itself (Yeomans 2014: 55), also visible in the temperance and teetotal-
ing movements. Middle-class ideals of appropriate behaviour and self-discipline
combined with religious and medical views on drinking led to increasing con-
demnation of the lack of personal restraint inherent in drinking. Furthermore,
 Claudia Claridge
especially excessive working-classes drinking came to be seen as causing poverty,

disease, disorder as well as general social and economic dysfunctionality (Green-
away 2003: 4, 8).
Unsurprisingly, the ubiquity of drinking also shows up in the courts. The Old
Bailey proceedings, for example, contain hundreds of references to drinking places
in a variety of criminal cases (Jennings 2007: 20). Public drunkenness itself was
a petty crime (tried at other courts than the Old Bailey), with such prosecutions
rising after 1868 (e.g., about 30,000 convictions in 1892 in London) and with sen-
tences in these and others involving drink becoming more severe (Wiener 1990:
155; Jennings 2013: 62). While drunkenness had been treated rather leniently and
seen rather as a mitigating factor in the past, the nineteenth century increasingly
took a stricter view of the matter (Wiener 1990: 78–80). Drink became an expla-
nation for other crimes and there were indeed opinions, such as those of Lord
Brougham, that saw intoxication as an aggravation of an offence (Wiener 1990: 80).
One problem in this context is the assessment of drunkenness, for which no legal
definition or objective measurement existed (Wiener 1990: 298; Jennings 2013:
64). The legal stance seems to have been concerned with the degree or rather lack
of self-control of the intoxicated person (Yeomans 2014: 86). The loss of control
due to alcohol could be and was linked to that caused by insanity (see also Rabin
2005); this also led to a closer conceptual link between drinking and crime in
general (Wiener 1990: 349). A letter in the Times (Jan. 4, 1830) voices exactly this
sentiment stating that “the worst cases of murder, street robbery, housebreaking,
seduction, and suicide, may all be traced to this horrid source”, namely drunken-
ness (Yeomans 2014: 50). This legal view may very well have been in conflict with
popular notions. Jennings (2013: 65) reports a pub landlady in 1864 as describing
a customer who had drunk from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. as “merry, and quite jolly, but
not lushy”; he was still standing up and not lying on the floor, which seems to have
been decisive for not being drunk properly.
The second problem arising in court with regard to drunkenness was thus
the potential conflicting definitions at work – and this was indeed visible between
judges and juries in the nineteenth century, who also might have different moral
agendas (Wiener 1999: 472). Judges with an overall ‘civilizing’ mission’ tended to
aim for stressing the ideal of self-mastery, reasonableness, and full responsibility
for one’s actions (Wiener 1999: 479, 477). In this respect, the traditional defences
of lack of intent to kill and provocation, both notably through drunkenness, came
to be greatly restricted over the Victorian period (Wiener 1999: 481). Juries tended
to take a more lenient view, finding in cases involving intoxication, for example, an
argument for manslaughter (instead of murder) or calling for mercy with respect
to the punishment (Wiener 1999: 484, 487, 488, 492, 494). Many murder trials in
the nineteenth century showed this battle between differing official (judges) and
Chapter 11. Negotiating intoxication in courtroom discourse 
popular (juries) views over the question of culpability, with judges sticking ever
more firmly to the stance, in judge Fitzjames Stephen’s words, that “if a drunken
man, because he was drunk, formed a drunken intent to do grievous bodily harm
to another person, and in so doing caused death, he was just as responsible for his
actions as if he had not been drunk” (Wiener 1999: 496).
3. Courtroom discourse: Data and approaches
The data basis is the Old Bailey Corpus 2.0 (OBC), which is a 24.4-million-word
corpus drawn from the proceedings of London’s central criminal court. The texts
in the corpus document courtroom discourse from 1720 through 1913.2 They were
taken down in shorthand by scribes in the courtroom (cf. Huber 2007 for more
background), and while they present a fairly good picture of historical speech
(with all necessary caveats), they are nevertheless not an ideal representation of
forensic interaction. In many transcripts the questions are missing (as in the fol-
lowing example), while the answers may have been fleshed out in form, such that
the italicised passage in Example (2) may in reality have been “about seven feet”.
(2) he was behind the dray when I laid hold of him. Both the drays had
stopped; he said the second dray was his. I went and measured the ground
– it was thirteen feet wide – the width of the dray was about seven feet. If the
driver had been there the accident would not have happened.
(t18231022–157)
Furthermore, charges, opening and closing statements, the judge’s summing up,
as well as arguments between lawyers and judges were often omitted (cf. Emsley
et al. 2003–2017). As a rule, though certainly not exclusively, the speech of legal
professionals will have been affected by such omissions, which may therefore be
underrepresented.
The corpus is encoded for speakers’ gender, their social class (according to the
historical social class scheme known as HISCLASS)3 and their speaker role in the
courtroom (whether they were victims, witnesses, defendants, lawyers or judges).
It has been divided into five periods of approximately forty years each, so as to
. The OBC is ultimately derived from the much larger The Proceedings of the Old Bailey,
1674–1913 by Clive Emsley, Tim Hitchcock, and Robert Shoemaker, and accessible here:
<www.oldbaileyonline.org/index.jsp>.
. HISCLASS is a system of 13 social classes, which for most sociohistorical analyses can be
simplified to a 2-class system, distinguishing a higher class (non-manual professions, HIS-
CLASS 1–5) and a lower class (manual professions, HISCLASS 6–13) (Huber et al. 2016a: 9).
 Claudia Claridge
make developments over time traceable. Table 1 presents a summary of the corpus
composition according to the period subdivisions and socio-functional character-
istics. Male voices clearly dominate, as they produced almost 20 million of the ca.
24 million words, whereas women are represented by nearly four million words.
Similarly, speakers from the higher classes are in the lead with almost eleven mil-
lion words compared to about five million by lower-class speakers. Regarding the
speaker roles, witnesses are the main informants, followed by victims and defen-
dants, whereas the professionals, lawyers and judges, contributed even less (see
Table 1).
Table 1. Word counts of the Old Bailey Corpus

1720–59 1760–99 1800–39 1840–79 1880–1913 Total %†
Periods 3,420,347 4,684,667 5,529,139 5,859,601 4,949,834 24,443,588

Females 662,385 732,948 860,608 932,755 691,050 3,879,746 16
Males 2,579,819 3,839,168 4,518,760 4,724,540 4,184,195 19,846,482 84
Defendants 209,993 347,587 349,242 237,600 377,674 1,522,096 7
Victims 587,243 884,888 1,252,800 852,129 639,494 4,216,554 9
Witnesses 1,401,308 1,895,277 2,912,865 4,370,239 3,857,501 14,437,190 66
Judges 101,912 218,083 133,246 70,238 7,146 530,625 2
Lawyers 243,700 598,032 353,129 117,168 14,941 1,326,970 6
Higher classes 888,477 1,751,316 2,358,375 2,895,354 2,815,307 10,708,829 68
Lower classes 564,538 973,895 1,281,435 1,203,219 920,810 4,943,897 32
†Percentages indicate the proportion of words spoken by the respective group annotated for the feature,
for example, six per cent in the case of lawyers, nine per cent in the case of victims, etc.
Note that the totals for gender, roles and social classes do not add up to the corpus
total, due to insufficient speaker information in a number of cases. Social class
information, for example, is known for only 64 per cent of the spoken words in the
corpus (Huber et al. 2016b: 7).
Historical courtroom discourse, often beyond the OBC, has meanwhile been
studied fairly widely (cf. Doty 2010), highlighting, for example, the nature of legal
question-answer sequences and face and (im)politeness aspects. Questioners,
usually though not exclusively legal professionals, could and did exert consider-
able power by specific interrogative strategies and also by breaching politeness
principles. Strategic question techniques include coercive polar questions, ques-
tions with a very narrow, that is, restrictive focus, declarative and other types
containing presuppositions, long and insistent question sequences, often with
repeat questions, as well as overtly challenging questions (Archer 2005, 2010,
Chapter 11. Negotiating intoxication in courtroom discourse 
2014; Kryk-Kastovsky 2009, 2010). In the present context, for example, lawyers
might directly ask about (degree of) intoxication and thus presuppose its presence.
While question types were meant to lead to a short precise and affirmative answer,
the addressees nevertheless often resorted to longer and more elaborate answers
(Archer 2005: 181–182), doubtlessly in attempts to restrict the damage done by the
question. Within a politeness context Chaemsaithong (2009) lists such strategies
of how interactants may attend to their own face (self-face) in order to enhance it
and thus to positively influence others’ evaluation of themselves (e.g., by shifting
the blame, by presenting positive aspects, by clear denial). Some instances of these
strategies can also be seen below in the present data. They might especially be
useful in the context of face aggravation (Archer 2014), with questioners overtly
or indirectly producing damaging views of the addressee, for instance, on their
drinking behaviour.
The approach taken here is a corpus linguistic one with a focus on identifying
potential overarching patterns of usage centred around the occurrence of lexical
items. The topic of drunkenness was approached via the Historical Thesaurus of the
Oxford English Dictionary (HTOED; Kay et al. 2009), in order to find expressions
for searching the OBC. Following the thesaurus path ‘the external world > the
living world > food and drink > beverage > thirst > excess in drinking > drink-
ing to excess [adjective]’ leads one to drunk and its eight sub-headings;4 of these
the small subgroup ‘drunk with specific drink’ (e.g., genevered, wined) yielded no
results. Of the 325 expressions compiled from drunk and its subcategories many
were excluded from OBC searching, namely those of late first attestation (1890s
and later, e.g., rumdum, 1891), a quite large group of potentially frequent words
with primarily other meanings (e.g., concerned, cut, hot, paid, stinking, wet), clearly
regional terms (e.g., footless Irish, stiff US), and colourful creations such as ele-
phant trunk considered stylistically inappropriate for the courtroom. Some items
were phrasal expressions containing one of the search words, for example, roaring
drunk, drunk as a fish. In this way, around 180 items were not searched in the OBC
at all. Of those searched about one hundred yielded no hits at all or no relevant
. An anonymous reviewer recommends looking at lists of words and expressions for drunk-
enness compiled by modern writers like Levine (1981). This article provides an interesting
catalogue of the terms for drunkenness contained in the second edition of Wentworth and
Flexner’s Dictionary of American Slang (1975); some of those terms (e.g., elevated, jolly, merry,
etc.), as might have been expected, coincide with terms ocurring in my own data. It is by no
means clear, however, that Levine’s listing would have proved a better source of evidence than
the OED for the historical study of British English usage which is the concern of this chapter.
 Claudia Claridge
ones.5 Given the great amount of search items and the generally fairly modern/
standard orthography of the OBC, searching for variant forms was dispensed
with.6 Finally, as the focus is on the presence of drunkenness, the 4,099 occur-
rences of the word sober, of which almost 90 per cent may occur with the relevant
sense, are not explicitly part of the data, but will be paid attention to at appropriate
points of the discussion.
Relevant items were manually carefully checked for pertinent occurrences,
that is, those really referring to drunkenness of people whether directly (cf. Exam-
ple (1) above) or indirectly via their actions (e.g., a drunken row). Thus, cases as in
(3), with merry meaning ‘cheerful’ and half-and-half referring to a kind of drink,
were excluded.
(3) a. I have heard the Girls in the House call him my Guardian, in a merry
Way, but no otherwise. (t17320114–41)
b. I was not in want of bread and cheese or half-and-half (t18370227–737)
This yielded 9,206 relevant hits, distributed across 30 different forms. A substan-
tial subset of the hits was then coded for intensification (presence and type: up
vs. moderate/down; cf. Quirk et al. 1985: 589–590; Claridge 2011: 9–12), target
reference (self: I, we; second person: you; third person: he, she, they, various noun
phrases), negation, and occurrence in direct speech, questions, or vocative. Notes
were made for further potentially interesting contexts. The subset of coded 4,407
hits was constructed by including only a random selection of the two most fre-
quent items, drunk (1,000 of 4,005) and in liquor (500 of 2,294). Sociolinguistic
information such as sex, social class, role of speaker is already provided by the
usual corpus search output. Regarding class, OBC coding uses the 13 categories of
the HISCLASS scheme (see footnote 3 above), which are then further combined
into a higher and a lower class group, representing all non-manual and all manual
professions respectively (Huber et al. 2016b: 7, 9).
. A check of fifteen items excluded on the grounds above yielded zero relevant hits for
twelve of them (be mops and brooms, bene-bowsie, elephant trunk, fairish, flagonal, fly-blown,
footless, half-cocked, nazzy, pixilated, screwy, tight) and for the remaining three items one (spre-
eish), two (queer) and three (lush) potentially relevant hits. The many items yielding no hits
indicate that the results of the chosen method may be taken as fairly trustworthy.
. Many forms (e.g., intoxicated, inebriated) have no variant forms in the OED. A spot search
on disguised based on the forms contained in the OED entry yielded zero hits on all except one
variant (disguis’d) with nine attestations across the eighteenth century. Forms like tosticated (2
hits), tossicated (1 hit) for intoxicated, were not included either, but are apparently not frequent
in general. Note also that, strictly speaking, these two are not spelling variants, but reflections
of uneducated lexical misuse; see OED Tosticate v.
Chapter 11. Negotiating intoxication in courtroom discourse 
4. Courtroom discourse on drunkenness
Before moving on to the primary concerns of this chapter, a general overview

of the full data (i.e., 9,206 hits in Tables 2–4 below) will be provided. The topic
of drunkenness is fairly common in the courtroom. The 9,206 occurrences cor-
respond to a frequency of 37.7 per 100,000 words. Moreover, these occurrences
are spread widely across the corpus, being found in 579 (91%) of the 637 corpus
files, which corresponds to occurrence in 4,223 different trials. In 63 of these
trials, there are between 10 and 25 occurrences, pointing to drunkenness being
a more important topic in them – whereas in 2,226 trials (53%) drunkenness
is mentioned only once. A closer look at these 63 trials shows that especially
crimes involving violence against humans seem to favour extensive discussions,
namely, killing (36), wounding (7), rape (1), and (highway) robbery (4). These
lead in this small group with 76 per cent as against 24 per cent of non-violent
crimes, such as theft (10), deception (4) and bigamy (1). With regard to the
corpus periods (cf. Table 2) drunkenness seems to be relevant in the courtroom
across time, but shows an overall decline apart from a temporary recovery in the
middle period.
Table 2. Drunkenness expressions across time*

Normalised
frequency per
Periods Raw frequency 100,000 words
1720–59 1,478 43.2

1760–99 1,708 36.5
1800–39 2,234 40.4

1840–79 2,209 37.7
1880–1913 1,577 31.9
Total 9,206 37.7
*The figures are statistically significant (LogLikelihood) comparing each period to the following and the
first to the last period, at p < 0.0001 (periods 1 to 2, 4 to 5, and 1 and 5), p < 0.01 (periods 2 to 3) and p <
0.05 (periods 3 to 4).
Table 3. Sociolinguistic characteristics of users of drunkenness expressions

Higher Lower
Females Males classes classes
Raw frequency 1,745 7,174 3,122 1,959

Normalised frequency per 45.0 36.1 29.1 39.6
100,000 words
 Claudia Claridge
Table 4. Courtroom roles and the use of drunkenness expressions

Normalised frequency
Raw frequency per 100,000 words
Defendant 1,430 93.9

Judge 271 51.1
Lawyer 544 41.0
Victim 1,495 35.5
Witness 4,528 31.4
The first decline from the 1760s may reflect both decrease in drunkenness involved
in the crimes treated as well as changed attitudes after the gin panics, the second
decline setting in the 1840s may show some effects of the Victorian temperance
movement. The fact that 42 of the 63 high-frequency trials mentioned above are
dated 1800 to 1913 may also indicate the increasing moral and legal concern with
drunkenness, in the sense that individual cases are given more careful scrutiny.
With regard to users of drunkenness expressions Table 3 shows that women
and lower-class speakers use relatively more of them. This could either reflect
these speakers’ greater affinity to drunkenness, either from their own or second-
hand experience, or the possibility that they are more often made to talk about it
by other courtroom participants. The latter case might then also show social ste-
reotypes at work, as from the eighteenth century onwards concern about drunk-
enness was mostly related to lower-class behaviour, and female drinking had been
also in focus since the gin panics.
Focussing on the role of speakers in the courtroom7 (Table 4), one notices that
the speakers fall into three groups, not only according to their functions but also
based on their frequencies: (i) defendants, (ii) judges and lawyers, and (iii) victims
and witnesses.8
Defendants have most to lose in the proceedings and are the most frequent
users of drunkenness expressions by normalised frequency. This may have to do
with various motivations, for example, with them trying to downgrade their own
responsibility, blame others (at least partly), or by them being asked more spe-
cifically about it (cf. more below). Witnesses and victims have the highest raw
figures, but as they also contribute most talk overall, their actual use is the lowest.
. The role of interpreter, found with 27 instances, is disregarded here.

. The same grouping is found with sober, but with defendants using this form least (6.7 per
100,000 words), judges (34.7) and lawyers (35.2) the most, and victims (19.3) and witnesses
(15.0) in between. The professionals’ use of sober is illustrated in (4) below.
Chapter 11. Negotiating intoxication in courtroom discourse 
They may describe others’ degree of intoxication at the time of the crime, but very
commonly it is their own alcohol-related state that is in focus. Most of the ques-
tions involving drunkenness by judges and lawyers are directed to them, with the
questioning often being very insistent (as Example (4) shows), and thus boost-
ing the frequency of use by legal professionals. It highlights how important this
aspect seems to have been for this speaker group.9 Example (4) is part of the cross-
examination of a witness, who was a lodger in a house that was burgled. The point
here is to establish whether the burgled house was locked (and to what degree), by
checking the credibility of the last person to enter and lock the house.
(4) Court. Did you try afterwards whether you had locked it? – I did; it was as
fast as it could be.
Counsel. You are a coachman? – Yes.
You love what is good? – Yes.
Was you quite sober that night? – Very sober as ever I was in my life.
How came you not to bolt the door as well as lock it? – I seldom do; I know
it is a good lock.
You had not been a little merry that night had you? – Not at all.
You was perfectly sober? – Yes.
Recollect – half and half? – No.
Is it always your practice to examine the door after you shut it to see that it
is fast? – Yes; I know it was fast. (t17770702–9).10
The questioner is clearly trying by insistent repeat questions to make the witness
admit to at least some intoxication by using milder and partly euphemistic expres-
sions (merry, half and half), to no avail however. The witness partly uses Chaem-
saithong’s (2009: 69) strategy of baldly/straightforward denying the questioner’s

insinuation (not at all; no). In contrast, the victim in Example (5) rather carelessly
admits to excessive drunkenness, thus not paying attention to self-face, so that the
jury feels the need for a protective remark.
. It may thus be assumed that the real use of judges and lawyers was much higher, maybe
close to defendants, and is only downplayed by the transcription omissions of the proceed-
ings.
. Note the prominent occurrence of sober in (4), which is not included in the search terms
here. There are 4,099 instances of sober in OBC, of which probably around 70–75 per cent
are alcohol-related meanings (based on checking a quarter of the instances). One of these in-
stances is the judge-victim exchange, with a punning/humorous answer: Was not you fuddled?
– Barter. No; I was as sober as a Judge. (17320705).
 Claudia Claridge
(5) Edward Stone. I lost fifteen guineas and a-half. I was exceeding drunk last
Saturday night, that is true; and coming home, in Long Acre, two women
met me, and inveigled me to go home with them, that was the prisoner and
another woman; I am sure I did not know what I did.
Jury. Dont treat it with levity.
Stone. I do not treat it with levity; (…).
Court. As you was very drunk, are you positive you had the fifteen guineas
in your pocket?
Stone. Yes, I am. (t17750712–50).
In both Examples (4) and (5), the consciousness and awareness of the person
under interrogation at the time of the crime and the resultant reliability of stated/
remembered facts are the main focus, which is representative for many such and
similar examples in the OBC.
4.1 Expressions for drunkenness in context

The thirty expressions found in the data (see Section 3 above) can be sorted into
groups using various categorizations. One is frequency:
–– very high (1,000 +): drunk, in liquor11
–– high (100 +): intoxicate(d), tipsy, drunken, for liquor, fuddled, under the influence
–– medium (10 +): in drink, disguised, fresh, elevated, merry, full, with liquor, ine-
briated, boozed, groggy
–– low (1–9): half seas over, jolly, drunkish, freshish, half-and-half, lumpy, liquor-
ish, malty, maudlin, reeling, sodden, suckey
One can distinguish those that refer directly to drunkenness/alcohol from others
with transferred senses, such as fuddled, disguised, fresh, elevated, merry, groggy,
lumpy, sodden etc. The latter, together with even more colourful ones like half seas
over, have a euphemistic touch. Thus, they also indicate various strength of intoxi-
cation, cf. strong drunk/drunken, intoxicated, inebriated, boozed, full versus mild
fuddled, elevated, merry, jolly, tipsy as well as the diminutives drunkish, freshish.
Such terms may therefore be used with a mitigating effect. Finally, there is a stylis-
tic difference with more formal, sometimes technical words (e.g., intoxicated, ine-
briated, under the influence) versus informal, potentially slang words (e.g., boozed,
malty, sodden). These semantic and stylistic nuances allow the expression of stance
and (im)politeness towards drunkenness and drunks.
. The PPs in/for liquor can occur on their own, but like with liquor are sometimes/often
preceded by an adjective, for example, the worse for liquor, forward in liquor, stupid with
liquor. Of those adjectives elevated (in/with) and disguised (in) often also occur on their own
(metonymically), and thus were counted separately.
Chapter 11. Negotiating intoxication in courtroom discourse 
Given this lexical range, it may be interesting to focus in on speaker groups, here
the two major groups separable by their legal expertise: professionals (judges, law-
yers) versus lay speakers (defendants, witnesses, victims). Table 5 shows large-scale
overlap,12 which is partly due to the care taken with word choice, that is, the neces-
sity to take up and repeat what a witness has said in order to discuss it in more detail.
Table 5. Expressions used by professional and lay participants†

Court professionals (23) Lay participants (27)
boozed
disguised
drunk
drunken
drunkish
elevated
for liquor
fresh
freshish
fuddled
full
groggy
half seas over
half-and-half
in drink
in liquor
inebriated
intoxicate(d)
jolly
liquorish
lumpy
malty
maudlin
merry
reeling
sodden
tipsy
under the influence
with liquor
†shared words in the middle, words in italics used by defendants
. This could also be (partly) due to normative interventions by scribes and publishers, as a
reviewer pointed out, and this possibility cannot be fully excluded. However, words like malty,
half seas over, which are labelled as ‘humorous’ by the OED, and lumpy which is labelled as
‘slang’, nevertheless occur in the OBC.
 Claudia Claridge
There are also some differences. Lay speakers use a somewhat greater range of
terms, some of them more informal (e.g., boozed, sodden), and at least one of them
of a euphemistic and downplaying nature (jolly). The professionals’ words are not
necessarily more formal, with inebriated even only found with lay people. There is,
however, the professional avoidance of (newer?) casual terms like boozed, whose
earliest quotation in the OED dates from 1850. The fact that infrequent words
like drunkish and lumpy are used by both groups is due to the kind of priming
mentioned above, repeating the earlier words of another speaker as in Example
(5) above. It may also be because of necessary metadiscussion as in Example (6).
(6) WILLIAM SANDERS (police-constable). I took the prisoner on the 17th of
August – (…) – he said, “I do not know any thing about it; if I did it, I did it
when I was lumpy.”
Cross-examined. Q. What is lumpy? A. I imagine it means drunk.
(t18410920–2407).
In Section 2 above the contemporary description of a drinker as “merry, and quite

jolly, but not lushy” was quoted. Thus, the co-occurrence of terms is especially
interesting. In an extended exchange between cross-examiner, using repeat ques-
tions, and the victim of an alleged highway robbery various terms are used:
(7) Q. I take it for granted that you will take on yourself to swear that you was
not drunk? – I was drunkish, a little fresh and that was all.
Q. Had you been drinking any thing before you came to this public house?
– I had been drinking rum and water at Hampton. I drank two three
pennyworths of rum and water.
Q. No gin that night? – No, no gin at all.
Q. Was not you mortally drunk when you went out of this public house? –
No, I was not.
Q. Then you had a perfect recollection of what past? – Yes.
Q. Now you told the gentlemen of the jury that you was drunkish. Will you
state that you have as perfect a recollection of what passes drunk as sober? –
I have got as good a memory drunk as sober. I have a very good memory.
Q. And it is helped by liquor; when you get half seas over it is brushed up? –
Yes; I recollect this transaction very well.
Q. Do you mean to let these gentlemen understand that being in liquor,
your memory was better than at any other time? – I recollect it very well.
Q. Do you mean that you recollect it better because you had liquor? – No,
that is not what I mean. (t17940219–4).
The implication of drunk is countered by admitting to only drunkish and fresh; in

spite of that the questioner tries drunk once more, even intensified, but then, after
Chapter 11. Negotiating intoxication in courtroom discourse 
accepting drunkish, tries out half seas over, probably indicating a higher degree
than the former but less than drunk. In the end, the indeterminate and fairly neu-
tral in liquor is used, perhaps due to the victim’s insistence on being in sufficient
self-control.13 Such careful negotiations, involving contrasting terms, negation
and often but, are found in many instances in the Old Bailey. They illustrate the
different strength of terms as well as concern about presenting a nuanced and/
or favourable picture. Witnesses and victims indulge in such negotiation much
more commonly than defendants, while professionals do not use this strategy at
all. The terms used in this context are disguised, drunk, elevated, forward in liquor,
fresh, fuddled, groggy, in drink, inebriated, intoxicated, jolly, merry, tipsy, the worse
for liquor, some of which are illustrated in the examples in (8). Of those terms
drunk (8a,c,d) and intoxicated (8e) followed by disguised (8b) represent the stron-
gest forms and are invariably the negated poles, while all the other terms are used
assertively and for downplaying the degree of intoxication. One might see these
cases in terms of Chaemsaithong’s (2009: 69) redressive strategy of giving straight-
forward answer but modified in a positive manner for the speaker. The majority of
such deescalating remarks are found in the nineteenth century when drinking and
drunkenness was becoming more of a negatively loaded issue.
(8) a. Arundel. I don’t think he was quite sober, but he was thoroughly merry;
for if a Man is capable of sitting upon his Horse, I can’t think, he can be
said to be drunk. (t17330404–44, witness)
b. Q. By this time you had pretty near liquor enough. – A. No, not so
much for four people, I might be fresh, but not any ways disguised.
(t18070701–17, victim)
c. I was able to walk – I had had some drink, I did not feel anything the
worse – I might be tipsy, but not drunk. (t18540403–563, witness)

d. A. He was not quite drunk: he was the worse for liquor, but was able to
walk and talk. (t18021027–103, witness)
e. I was going to Conduit-street – stopped at several places, and had a
pint of ale probably in each place – I was not intoxicated, but might be
perhaps a little elevated (t18360404–999, defendant)
f. Q. You were quite drunk, were you not? A. No; I was rather fresh
(t18520223–337, lawyer – victim)
More intricate stages might be supplied by intensifying the terms used, as in a

little elevated, thoroughly merry, and not quite drunk. Similarly, the positive term
. Of course, other strategies are combined with the variation of drunkenness terms here
and elsewhere, for example, the last three questions are clearly challenging the (credibility of
the) victim by making a ludicrous insinuation.
 Claudia Claridge
sober might be used for mitigation, but with negation, as in not (perfectly, quite)
sober.14 Not… quite sober as in (8a) implies close to sober, thus close to the positive
state. Self-descriptions as in examples (8b,c,e,f) are more commonly used in this
way than third-person descriptions, here referring to the defendant (8a) and the
victim (8d). What is also noteworthy in these cases is that often further evidence
for the degree of drunkenness or soberness is supplied, cf. ability to sit on one’s
horse (8a), to walk (8c,d), and to talk (8d). Such statements are not uncommon
also where only one drunkenness item occurs and often this also takes the form
of an explicit reference to consciousness, perhaps echoing the legal concern with
self-mastery mentioned in Section 2. The examples in (9) show statements about
the state the defendant was in, adding evidence for the statement (9a) or a remark
on the degree of responsibility. It is noteworthy that the early twentieth-century
example is by a mother trying to defend her son.
(9) a. he was undoubtedly drunk; he was unable to stand steadily
(t19040111–161, police witness, about defendant)
b. He was a little the worse for liquor – he knew what he was about
(t18610408–339, police witness, about defendant)
c. He has always been a good son; when he is in drink he does not seem
responsible for his actions. (t19130107–51, victim, about defendant)
In the examples in (10) it is defendants themselves speaking, with earlier examples

being quite forthright and apparently unashamed about the state of drunken-
ness, especially (10a,b). While (10a–d) try to downplay the responsibility of the
accused, the late example (10e) does the opposite, the speaker being obviously
concerned with making a good impression. Different approaches to self-face are
clearly in evidence here.
(10) a. and I was so drunk that I fell twice off my Horse at the Park Gate.
(t17330404–44, defendant)
I know nothing of it, for I was quite stupified in liquor; I can’t really say
b.
any thing to it. (t17551204–17, defendant)
c. I was fuddled, and don’t know what I did. (t17540717–48, defendant)
d. I was the worse for liquor, and did not know that I had this [= stolen
item]. (t18410823–2303, defendant)
. 316 sober examples (= 7.7% of a total of 4,099 sober) are thus negated, occurring over-
whelmingly in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Of those 316, 134 (42%) are pre-
modified by an item similar to quite (very, too, exactly etc.) indicating only little removal from
soberness.
Chapter 11. Negotiating intoxication in courtroom discourse 
e. I had been having one or two glasses; I was nothing near drunk. I was
not unconscious. (t19060430–64, defendant)
Witnesses and victims-as-witnesses in the examples in (11) use the but-strategy to

clearly state that regardless of their (ever so) slight intoxication, they were com-
pletely in possession of their faculties and therefore, first, not themselves to blame
in the connection of the crime, and secondly capable of giving reliable evidence.
(11) a. I was a little fuddled, but I can remember every thing very well.
(t17601204–14, victim)
b. I was a little elevated, but was sober enough to know perfectly what
passed. (t17790915–44, victim)
c. I was the worse for liquor, but not insensible. (t18210411–151, victim)
d. I was coming out of the Phoenix public-house, Norton-falgate; I was
rather groggy, but knew what I was about (t18270712–173, victim)
f. I was a little merry. I was sensible. I am sure she is the woman.
(t18120701–57, victim)
4.2 Targets of drunkenness terms

We have already seen above that drunkenness can be predicated about various
people or targets, referring to the speakers themselves (I, we), as in Examples (10)–
(11) or to third persons (he, she, they, NPs), cf. the instances in (9). Additionally,
there may be a second-person reference (you), indicating either the interlocutor in
the courtroom (cf. 4–5 above) or somebody else in quoted direct-speech contexts,
as in the examples in (12). In the first case, it occurs overwhelmingly in questions,
or in statements leading to questions, of professionals to lay interactants.
(12) a. I said, “Cook, you appear to me tipsy” (t18390513–1625, victim)

b. but he said to Solloway, You are a drunken, foolish fellow,
(t17611021–21, witness)
Table 6 details the distribution of these types, which shows that third-person ref-
erence is by far the most common case, that is, affecting somebody else’s face.
This is connected to talk about the defendant between lawyers/judges, victims and
witnesses being most naturally conducted in the third person, cf. examples in (9)
above; other persons referred to in narrating the circumstances of the crime will
of course also be referred to in the third person. For lawyers, judges and witnesses
third-person references constitute the majority with 66 per cent, 69.6 per cent, and
as much as 90.6 per cent of their drunkenness discourse.
While third-person reference is less common in defendants’ speech, it may
fulfil the useful function of talking about others’ responsibility. The utterances in
 Claudia Claridge
Table 6. Targets of drunkenness predication according to speaker roles*

Third-person Second-person
reference Self-reference reference
Defendant 233 436 30

Judge 80 0 35
Lawyer 144 0 74
Victim 319 407 9
Witness 2,012 165 44
Unknown 262 143 14
Total (%) 3,050 (69.2) 1,151 (26.1) 206 (4.7)
*This table and Table 7 below are based on the coded subsection of the data as explained in Section 3
(4,407 occurrences). The category ‘Unknown’ (here and in Table 7) combines the interpreter role (10 cases)
with the larger number of utterances that are not attributed to a specific speaker role in the corpus. The
table also contains two manual corrections of self-references erroneously attributed to judge/lawyer.
(13) are part of the defence of John Lennard, accused of raping Ann Boss; they
serve the purpose of demolishing the credibility of both the victim (Miss Boss)
and a witness (Mrs. Wyatt)15 by describing them as very drunk at the time of the
alleged crime.
(13) Miss Boss was so drunk she could not speak, and was crying, and said she
was ruined and undone; I asked her at last where was the rum; she said, I
do not know what is become of it. Mrs. Wyatt was so drunk she could not
stand, and Miss Boss was drunk, with her head on her hand, something
slipping down; at last Mrs. Wyatt came up stairs; that was the second time
of returning. I did not see her in the afternoon; she fell in the passage she
was so drunk: (t17730707–2)
When witnesses, and also victims, talk about their own state of intoxication,
they are usually made to do so by the court professionals, in order to test and/or
attack their reliability or to imply some culpability on their part. In turn they will
be concerned with denying any problem in this respect, which accounts for the
fairly high number of victims’ self-references (55.4% of all their drunkenness tar-
gets). Example (7) above shows how a victim partly contradicts the drunkenness
assumption by using his own weaker terms, whereas in the instance in (14) the
victim takes over the word choice of the questioner, but tones it down.
. Apparently unsuccessfully: he is found guilty and sentenced to death.
Chapter 11. Negotiating intoxication in courtroom discourse 
(14) Court. You say you was drunk, are you sure you dropp’d none of it in the
Street? Ford. Yes, I was drunk, that’s true; but not so drunk as that comes to
neither. (t17320705–35, judge-victim)
However, even intensive questioning may not lead to the use of drunk expres-
sions, as in Example (4) above, where the interlocutor only negates and affirms in
general. The rarity of second-person reference, as in the first utterances in Exam-
ple (14), is almost certainly due to the transcription practice of leaving out many
of the questions (cf. Example (2) in Section 3).
Both defendants and victims use drunkenness expressions in the major-
ity referring to themselves, in 62 per cent and 55 per cent respectively. In both
cases their own state and behaviour is of importance for assessing the crime.
Defendants bring up the topic themselves, for example when they take the part
of questioner in their own defence, as in a case of wounding (15a) and one of
theft (15b).
(15) a. Q. Was not I tipsy? A. You were both drunk, but you knew what you
were doing and saying (…) I was very tipsy; I only remember throwing
the saucer. (…) Brown’s Defence. I was very tipsy, and obliged to be
taken on a stretcher. I am not accustomed to drink. I never used a knife.
(t18720610–469, defendant)
b. Prisoner. Q. Do you think I was intoxicated? A. You did not appear so at
all – (…) – there was not the least sign of intoxication.
Prisoner’s Defence. It is evident I was found in the house – how I came
there I know not – (…) – three young men, very respectably attired,
met me, and seeing me intoxicated, they led me, but where, I cannot say
(t18350302–716, defendant)
In both cases, the defendants try to use drunkenness as mitigating evidence, and
even stick to it as the trials proceed after the witnesses failed to (fully) corroborate
their own evaluation. These cases are similar to the instances in (10) and indeed
drunkenness as a general explanation of non-responsibility is the dominant func-
tion for defendants. Often this takes the general form of being insensible, being
incapable of doing something, and not knowing/remembering, but sometimes it
is more specific, as the claim to be brought to the scene of a theft by others (15b)
or the consequences stated in Example (16).
(16) a. I never was in company with him before that Saturday night; and I was
a little in liquor, and was over persuaded by him. (t17650522–39)
b. I came home in liquor, and by mistake I pawned these things, thinking
they were mine (t18350406–1036)
Finally, drunkenness may be presented as the exception to an otherwise good

behaviour and character, combined with an apology, as in Example (17).
 Claudia Claridge
(17) I was a little in liquor, and never did the like before; I am very sorry for it.
(t17670909–72)
This is probably intended as a plea for leniency or mercy, which in this case did not
prevent a guilty verdict and transportation.
4.3 Degrees of drunkenness

As evident in many examples above, drunk items may occur on their own (16b), be
semantically lowered (16a) or be amplified (15a). Amplifiers include maximizers
(e.g., extremely, exceedingly) and boosters (e.g., very (much), greatly), while down-
toners include the whole range from approximators to minimizers, such as almost,
partly, somewhat, a little (Quirk et al. 1985: 597–599). Expressions like as drunk as
possible, neither sober nor drunk were also included under amplifiers and down-
toners, respectively. Quite, pretty, and rather were found to be amplifying here (on
pretty cf. also Nevalainen & Rissanen 2002: 369; Tagliamonte 2008: 370), although
much ambiguity with pretty is otherwise present in OBC data (cf. Claridge & Kytö
2014: 40). So was included as an amplifier, even where complementation followed,
as in each case the effect was one of increasing the degree of drunkenness; cf.
examples in (18).
(18) a. He stood Sea sawing upon the Stairs, and told me, he was so drunk that
he could not get into his Bed. (t17391205–52, witness)
b. she was then so intoxicated that she was obliged to be led by another
woman (t18000115–1, witness)
The overall picture reveals that the majority of drunkenness references remains
unmodified (67.2%), while amplification is found in 1,090 instances (24.7%)16
and downtoning in 355 cases (8.1%). The breakdown according to speaker roles
is shown in Table 7, which indicates defendants as the most prominent amplifiers
and victims as the most frequent downtoners. All groups, including victims, do
more amplifying than downtoning, however.
As Examples (4) and (7) already showed, judges and lawyers are clearly inter-
ested in the link between intoxication, responsibility, and trustworthiness. Such
questions about intoxication, while often unintensified, are somewhat more often
accompanied by amplifiers (19) than by downtoners (20), thus the presupposition
of drunkenness is strengthened. Amplification tends to occur rather with second-
person address, and is in this case often partly refuted in the answer by mitigation
. Cf. also the amplification of negated sober mentioned in Section 4.1 and footnote 14
above.
Chapter 11. Negotiating intoxication in courtroom discourse 
Table 7. Drunkenness expressions amplified or toned down (% of speaker uses in

brackets)*
Amplification Downtoning Unmodified
Defendant 246 (35.2) 42 (6) 410 (58.8)

Judge 14 (12) 5 (4.3) 98 (83.8)
Lawyer 31 (14.1) 11 (5) 177 (80.8)
Victim 153 (20.8) 94 (12.8) 487 (66.3)
Witness 519 (23.4) 150 (6.8) 1,551 (69.9)
Unknown 127 53 239
Total 1,090 (24.7) 355 (8.1) 2,962 (67.2)
*Female speakers have a higher amplification ratio than males (31% vs. 23.1%), but a lower downtoning
one (5.1% vs. 8.7%).
or negation, cf. Chaemsaithong’s (2009: 69) strategy of modified straightforward

answer. Instances like (20) are usually not marked by explicit disagreement, which
may be an effect of addressees finding the mitigated question rather harmless.
(19) a. Q. Was you a good deal in liquor? – A. I was a little. (t17801018–41,
lawyer, victim)
b. Q. You were rather fresh? – A. I was a little fresh (t18430703–2117,
lawyer, victim)
c. Q. I am told that you were exceedingly intoxicated that night? – A. I was
not very drunk – I had been drinking a bottle or two of sherry, perhaps,
but I had no porter; (t18270712–199, lawyer, victim)
(20) a. Q. Did he appear a little tipsy? – A. Yes, I think so. (t18290716–14)
b. Q. The poor fellow was a little the worse for liquor, was not he? – A. I
cannot say whether he was or not. (t18000917–132)
Some amplification occurs in negation (about 7%), as in the answer of Example

(19c), where it is the focus of the negator. If one focuses on the link between
speaker role, target of expression, and intensification the following picture arises.
Both amplification and downtoning are used more for third- and second-person
targets by judges, lawyers (cf. 19, 20), and witnesses, while victims and defendants
use most of them in their self-descriptions: 61 per cent and 65 per cent of their
amplifications and 79 per cent each of their downtoning. This is in line with the
victim’s and defendant’s states at the time of the crime as both most relevant and
disputable. The degree of amplification also fits the observations above: defen-
dants try to use intoxication as a mitigating factor, often in their final defence
 Claudia Claridge
as in Example (17), but also in narrating the circumstances. In Example (21) the
defendant claimed not to have stolen the saddle (as indicted), but in his drunken
state intended to take it to the watch.
(21) The thing was, I was very much tipsey that night; I saw that saddle lay down
by the wall, and I took it up, and I did intend to carry it to the watch-house
(…) (t17930626–50)
Regarding the forms of intensification, downtoning mostly concerns diminishing,

minimizers only coming to 20 instances, and is dominated by the form (a) little (229
instances). The only other double-digit contributors are half (25 hits) and slightly (14
hits). While downtoning thus does not draw any attention to itself, there are some
more interesting cases with regard to amplification. Besides the extremely common
very (247), much (110), very much (285), here one also finds a number of less usual
forms, which are more evaluative and often exhibit a manner meaning in line with
the state of drunkenness. Of a clearly evaluative nature and also intensifying are
base, beastly, damned, disgustingly, dreadfully, hopelessly, intolerably, terribly, while
the following all refer to behaviour and states that can accompany drunkenness:
crying, dead, fearfully, helplessly, incapably, insensibly, mad, stupid(ly), stupefied, silly,
staggering, stone-blind, violently. These more colourful items are commonly used by
lay participants, in the examples in (22) in the attempt of defendants to make the
victim appear in a bad light, and in instance (23) the same of a witness about the
defendant. They are used in other-descriptions and are thus face attacks.
(22) a. He was beastly tipsy when he came up and spoke to us
(t18350511–1290)
b. Q. from prisoner. After we had been married four months, when we
had been out, whether my wife was not dead drunk upon the bed when
we came home? (t17670115–24)
(23) she was disgustingly intoxicated (t18710710–530)
In Example (24) we find disagreement about the victim Chapman describing him-
self as not completely drunk, but being immediately contradicted by a witness,
who clearly intends a degree of drunkenness involving lack of self-control.
(24) Chapman. I was able to walk – I had fallen before, but a person had assisted
me up – I was not thoroughly intoxicated.
Charles Payne. I saw Chapman in Whitechapel Road stupidly drunk and
sitting on the kerb. (t18750301–218)
Thus, such intensification strategies, even if they are not overly frequent, can con-
tribute important aspects to the negotiation of drunkenness in the courtroom.
Chapter 11. Negotiating intoxication in courtroom discourse 
5. Conclusion
As many of the examples above have shown, there is indeed negotiation of (degrees
of) drunkenness in the courtroom, with speakers interrogating others about it,
often very intensely, with speakers (partly) contradicting each other, and with
speakers crucially using drunkenness in their defence. That is, the use of drunk
terms is of course intertwined with other strategies. The two most prominent users
are also those two with very different stakes in the proceedings: the defendants
have most to lose, while the judges are concerned with upholding the legal and
(increasingly?) the moral order. With regard to drinking the two seem to have
conflicting agendas. While defendants keep on using incapacitation through drink
as a potential mitigating factor, the court’s insistent probing in questions is appar-
ently more in the interest of laying blame (on defendants as well as victims) than
on finding excuses. The defendants’ misconception of (evolving) legal views is also
apparent in their willingness to attribute intoxication to themselves and to even
amplify it. As victims also sometimes inflate their own drunkenness this further
corroborates a lay-professional split in this case. Whereas both defendants and
victims thus use the fact of drunkenness to diminish their responsibility, the other
very noticeable aspect in the data is the link between self-control and awareness
established by professionals, many witnesses, and some victims. The drunkenness
terms used have proved to be not very distinctive or clearly different in force for
the speaker groups, with only some more informal uses by lay people. The result is
undoubtedly due to the context and to priming going on.
It remains to be said that only the surface of the topic has been scratched,
as in fact much of the discussion uses other words than those selected here for
analysis. Sober will definitely have to be given more attention in further studies, as
well as general words for drinking, for drinking establishments, and for alcoholic
beverages (all visible in the examples above). The combined frequencies for beer,
ale, wine, gin, and punch, for example, come to 14,640 instances or 60 occurrences
per 100,000 words. Also, an in-depth discourse analytic approach to selected trials
may be worthwhile to complement the birds-eye view followed here with more
microscopic detail.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to two anonymous reviewers and the editors for helpful suggestions. Naturally, any
errors are entirely my own.
 Claudia Claridge
References
Archer, Dawn. 2005. Questions and Answers in the English Courtroom (1640–1760): A Socio-
pragmatic Analysis [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 135]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.135
Archer, Dawn. 2010. The historical courtroom. A diachronic investigation of English courtroom
practice. In The Routledge Handbook of Forensic Linguistics, Malcolm Coulthard & Alison
Johnson (eds), 185–198. London: Routledge.
Archer, Dawn. 2014. Historical Pragmatics: Evidence from The Old Bailey. Transactions of the
Philological Society 112(2): 259–277. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-968X.12011
Chaemsaithong, Krisda. 2009. Re-visiting Salem: Self-face and self-politeness in the Salem
witchcraft trials. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 10(1): 56–83.
https://doi.org/10.1075/jhp.10.1.04cha
Claridge, Claudia. 2011. Hyperbole in English. A Corpus-based Study of Exaggeration. Cambridge:
CUP.
Claridge, Claudia & Kytö, Merja. 2014. I had lost sight of them then for a bit, but I went on pretty
fast: Two degree modifiers in the Old Bailey Corpus. In Diachronic Corpus Pragmatics,
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 243], Irma Taavitsainen, Andreas H. Jucker & Jukka
Tuominen (eds), 29–52. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.243.05cla
Clark, Paul. 1983. The English Alehouse: A Social History 1200–1830. London: Longman.
Doty, Kathleen L. 2010. Courtroom discourse. In Historical Pragmatics, Andreas H. Jucker &
Irma Taavitsainen (eds), 621–650. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Emsley, Clive, Hitchcock, Tim & Shoemaker, Robert. 2003–2017. The Proceedings – The value
of the Proceedings as a historical source, Old Bailey Proceedings Online, Version 7.0. <www.
oldbaileyonline.org> (13 June 2018).
Greenaway, John. 2003. Drink and British Politics since 1830. A Study in Policy-making. London:
Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230510364
Huber, Magnus. 2007. The Old Bailey Proceedings, 1674–1834. Evaluating and annotating a cor-
pus of 18th- and 19th-century spoken English. In Annotating Variation and Change (Stud-
ies in Variation, Contacts and Change in English 1), Anneli Meurman-Solin & Arja Nurmi
(eds). Helsinki: Research Unit for Variation, Contacts and Change in English, University
of Helsinki.
Huber, Magnus, Nissel, Magnus & Puga, Karin. 2016a. Old Bailey Corpus 2.0.
<hdl:11858/00-246C-0000-0023-8CFB-2>
Huber, Magnus, Nissel, Magnus & Puga, Karin. 2016b. The Old Bailey Corpus 2.0, 1720–1913.
Manual. <http://fedora.clarin-d.uni-saarland.de/oldbailey/documentation.html> (1 Janu-
ary 2018).
Jennings, Paul. 2007. The Local. A History of the English Pub. Stroud: Tempus.
Jennings, Paul. 2013. Policing public houses in Victorian England. Law, Crime and History 3(1):
52–75.
Kay, Christian, Roberts, Jane, Samuels, Michael & Wotherspoon, Irené. 2009. Historical Thesau-
rus of the Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford: OUP.
Kryk-Kastovsky, Barbara. 2009. Speech acts in Early Modern English court trials. Journal of
Pragmatics 41(3): 440–457. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2008.06.009
Chapter 11. Negotiating intoxication in courtroom discourse 
Kryk-Kastovsky, Barbara. 2010. Power in Early Modern English courtroom discourse. In Dis-
courses in Interaction [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 203], Sanna-Kaisa Tanskanen,
Marja-Liisa Helasvuo, Marjut Johansson & Mia Raitaniemi (eds), 153–171. Amsterdam:
John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.203.13kry
Levine, Harry Gene. 1981. The vocabulary of drunkenness. Journal of Studies on Alcohol 42(11):
1038–1051. https://doi.org/10.15288/jsa.1981.42.1038
Nevalainen, Terttu & Rissanen, Matti. 2002. Fairly pretty or pretty fair? On the development and
grammaticalization of English downtoners. Language Sciences 24(3–4): 359–380.
https://doi.org/10.1016/S0388-0001(01)00038-9
OED = Oxford English dictionary online. <http://www.oed.com/> (1 January 2018).
Quirk, Randolph, Greenbaum, Sidney, Leech, Geoffrey & Svartvik, Jan. 1985. A Comprehensive
Grammar of the English Language. London: Longman.
Rabin, Dana. 2005. Drunkenness and responsibility for crime in the eighteenth century. Journal
of British Studies 44(3): 457–477. https://doi.org/10.1086/429705
Tagliamonte, Sali A. 2008. So different and pretty cool! Recycling intensifiers in Toronto, Can-
ada. English Language and Linguistics 12(2): 361–394.
https://doi.org/10.1017/S1360674308002669
Wiener, Martin J. 1990. Reconstructing the Criminal. Culture, Law, and Policy in England, 1830–
1914. Cambridge: CUP.
Wiener, Martin J. 1999. Judges v. jurors: Courtroom tensions in murder trials and the law of
criminal responsibility in nineteenth-century England. Law and History Review 17(3):
467–506. https://doi.org/10.2307/744379
Yeomans, Henry. 2014. Alcohol and Moral Regulation. Public Attitudes, Spirited Measures and
Victorian Hangovers. Bristol: Policy Press.

Claridge 2019 Drinking and Crime - Negotiating Intoxication in Courtroom Discourse 1720 To 1913

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Claridge 2019 Drinking and Crime - Negotiating Intoxication in Courtroom Discourse 1720 To 1913

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

chapter 11

Drinking and crime

This chapter investigates how drunkenness is presented during criminal

Keywords: drunkenness, face, (im)politeness, intensification, mitigation,

While the defendant pleaded ignorance and potential non-responsibility regarding

2. Alcohol consumption, attitudes, and crime

2014: 8, 35; Jennings 2007: 63).

especially excessive working-classes drinking came to be seen as causing poverty,

3. Courtroom discourse: Data and approaches

Table 1. Word counts of the Old Bailey Corpus

Periods 3,420,347 4,684,667 5,529,139 5,859,601 4,949,834 24,443,588

4. Courtroom discourse on drunkenness

Before moving on to the primary concerns of this chapter, a general overview

Table 2. Drunkenness expressions across time*

1720–59 1,478 43.2

1800–39 2,234 40.4

Table 3. Sociolinguistic characteristics of users of drunkenness expressions

Raw frequency 1,745 7,174 3,122 1,959

Table 4. Courtroom roles and the use of drunkenness expressions

Defendant 1,430 93.9

. The role of interpreter, found with 27 instances, is disregarded here.

saithong’s (2009: 69) strategy of baldly/straightforward denying the questioner’s

4.1 Expressions for drunkenness in context

Table 5. Expressions used by professional and lay participants†

In Section 2 above the contemporary description of a drinker as “merry, and quite

The implication of drunk is countered by admitting to only drunkish and fresh; in

worse – I might be tipsy, but not drunk.  (t18540403–563, witness)

More intricate stages might be supplied by intensifying the terms used, as in a

In the examples in (10) it is defendants themselves speaking, with earlier examples

Witnesses and victims-as-witnesses in the examples in (11) use the but-strategy to

4.2 Targets of drunkenness terms

(12) a. I said, “Cook, you appear to me tipsy”  (t18390513–1625, victim)

Table 6. Targets of drunkenness predication according to speaker roles*

Defendant 233 436 30

was so drunk:  (t17730707–2)

. Apparently unsuccessfully: he is found guilty and sentenced to death.

Finally, drunkenness may be presented as the exception to an otherwise good

4.3 Degrees of drunkenness

Table 7. Drunkenness expressions amplified or toned down (% of speaker uses in

Defendant 246 (35.2) 42 (6) 410 (58.8)

or negation, cf. Chaemsaithong’s (2009: 69) strategy of modified straightforward

Some amplification occurs in negation (about 7%), as in the answer of Example

Regarding the forms of intensification, downtoning mostly concerns diminishing,

You might also like

worse – I might be tipsy, but not drunk. (t18540403–563, witness)

(12) a. I said, “Cook, you appear to me tipsy” (t18390513–1625, victim)

was so drunk: (t17730707–2)