In US law schools, students not only learn how to “think” like a lawyer (Mertz 2007), but they also learn to “sound” like one using proper voice qualities. This article analyzes the discourses of mock trial judges who admonished female law students for their perceived lack or excess of acoustic amplitude or speech volume. Rather than explicitly comment that female law students sounded too “quiet” or too “loud,” however, the judges used two different discourses to comment on female law students’ voice quality. They employed direct metapragmatic discourse, voicing female law students in their role as attorneys, to negatively evaluate their low speech volume. Alternatively, the judges applied storytelling as an implicit metapragmatic discourse to comment on female law students whom they perceived as speaking too loud, articulating gendered ideologies about courtroom language that suggest that loud women break norms of courtroom speech decorum. An investigation into the metapragmatics of voice quality thus reveals that the mock trial experience can be doubly marginalizing for female law students: direct metapragmatics associates their low volume with weakness, and implicit metapragmatics associates their high volume with negative, unfeminine, and unlawyerly traits.

中文翻译：

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失去波西亚的声音：在美国模拟审判比赛中对“安静”和“大声”的女法学学生的元语用评价

在美国法学院，学生不仅学习如何像律师一样“思考”（Mertz，2007年），而且还学会使用适当的语音质量像人一样“发音”。这篇文章分析了模拟审判法官的话语，这些法官对女法学生的声音幅度或言语能力缺乏或过多提出了告诫。法官没有明确评论女法学生听起来太“安静”或“大声”，而是使用两种不同的话语来评论女法学生的声音质量。他们采用直接的元语用话语，为女法律学生发声，作为律师，对他们的低语气做出负面评价。另外，法官也将讲故事作为一种隐含的语用语用话语，以评论那些认为自己讲得太大声的女法律学生，阐明关于法庭语言的性别意识形态，这表明大声喧women的女性违反了法庭演讲礼节的规范。因此，对语音质量的元语用学进行的调查表明，模拟审判经验可能会使女法学学生双倍边缘化：直接元语用学将其低音量与虚弱联系起来，而隐式元语用学将其高音量与负面，女性化和不合法特征联系在一起。