법정 담화에 대한 법언어학적 분석: 대통령 탄핵 심판에서 곽종근 증인 심문을 중심으로

This study conducts a forensic linguistic analysis of courtroom discourse in the Constitutional Court’s presidential impeachment trial, focusing on the examination of witness Kwak Jong-geun. The dataset consists of 53,152 words of publicly available hearing transcripts, including direct and cross-examinations, judicial questioning, and final statements. Using frameworks from Legal Discourse Analysis and Critical Discourse Analysis, the study examines how power, ideological positioning, and responsibility attribution are discursively constructed in an adversarial setting. The analysis targets three dimensions: interactional power relations, lexicalization patterns, and question-answer organization. Results show that interpretive outcomes are shaped by competing macropropositions and by discourse strategies such as question control, limits on explanatory scope, and strategic address-term use. Lexical features, including cognition verbs and evaluative adverbs, function as markers of evidential stance. The findings highlight impeachment trial discourse as a key site of institutional meaning-making through language.