This article examines data drawn from a 2001 Ontario (Canada)
provincial inquiry into the deaths of seven people as a result of water
contamination in a small Ontario town. The examination focuses on
question-answer sequences in which the premier of Ontario, Michael Harris,
attempted to resist lawyers' attempts to control and restrict his
responses. In particular, on the basis of the data it is argued that the
power of cross-examining lawyers does not reside solely in their ability
to ask controlling and restrictive questions of witnesses, but rather is
crucially dependent on their ability to compel witnesses to produce
straightforward, or “type-conforming,” answers to these
controlling and restrictive questions. The witness whose testimony is
analyzed was not compelled to produce answers that logically conformed to
the form of the lawyers' questions (i.e., “yes” or
“no”) and, as a result, often usurped control over the topical
agenda of the proceedings. In this sense, the present work builds on
Eades's conclusion that “we cannot rely on question form to
discover how witnesses are controlled.”A previous version of this article was presented at
Sociolinguistics Symposium 15, Newcastle, U.K., in April 2004. We thank
audience members at that conference and two reviewers for Language in
Society for comments on previous versions. The research on which this
article is based was funded in part by a SSHRCC Regular Research Grant
(#410-2000-1330) to the first author.