Silence, hesitation, and legal meaning: interpreting non-fluent speech in Indonesian evidentiary discourse
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.67490/ijll.v1i3.1036Keywords:
credibility assessment , evidentiary discourse, forensic pragmatics, Indonesian courtroom discourse, non-fluent speechAbstract
Background: Indonesian evidentiary discourse assigns legal weight to spoken testimony, yet silence, hesitation, and other non-fluent speech forms often enter legal reasoning as signs to be interpreted rather than as ordinary communicative variation. Objective: This study examines how silence, hesitation, and non-fluent speech become meaningful inside Indonesian evidentiary documents, and how such meanings are institutionally taken up in legal reasoning. Method: This study applies a qualitative corpus-assisted discourse design, combining forensic pragmatics, courtroom discourse analysis, and credibility-discourse analysis, to a structured corpus of public evidentiary documents, procedural materials, and scholarly context sources. Results: Non-fluent speech is most often represented as a legally noticed absence of response, dominated by silence as non-answer, hesitation, and memory-related uncertainty. These forms are attached to legal meanings such as evidentiary uncertainty, procedural clarification, and credibility reservation, which are then routed institutionally through judicial evidentiary evaluation, courtroom procedural management, and investigative-record narration. Implication: This study argues that silence and hesitation should not be treated as self-evident indicators of deception, guilt, or unreliability, since their evidentiary force is produced through institutional uptake rather than inherent meaning. Novelty: This study offers an integrated discourse-based framework linking non-fluent speech representation, attributed legal meaning, and institutional uptake pathways in Indonesian evidentiary discourse.
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