Meaning transformation and recontextualization: from multimodal courtroom discourse to legal judgments

Legal judgments are the judicial documents issued by courts to adjudicate the parties’ rights and obligations. Court proceedings involve the construction of multidimensional meanings through various semiotic modes. These meanings can be retained, added, or deleted when recontextualized in written judgments based on the court’s perception of reinforced visual elements. This study aims to examine meaning transformations through a social semiotic lens, drawing on the context theory and paralinguistic system for multimodal discourse analysis, to explore how meanings are produced and shifted from courtroom discourse to written judgments and how these transformations contribute to persuasive effects. The findings demonstrate that lawyers strategically make salient meanings through verbal and paralinguistic resources to the court to enhance their persuasive impact. The court systematically filters these meanings by retaining visually reinforced elements, adding essential facts and reasons, while deleting those elements deemed peripheral to fact-finding. These meaning transformations reveal the court’s engagement with multimodal persuasion by accepting reinforced legally significant elements to strengthen a judgment’s credibility while aligning with legal and social expectations, thereby enhancing the decision’s legitimacy and public acceptance.