The Pragmatic Study Of The Defendants’ Defense Utterance In The Courtroom Of Corruption And Bribery Cases

The Cooperative Principle as a pragmatic theory in linguistics has been widely used in the discussion of all kinds of courtroom trials.Based on the classification of(legal)utterance of Ran Yongping,Liu Suzhen and Liu Xiangguo,this thesis classifies the defense utterance into six kinds,which includes the additional information,hedges,idioms,code switching and code mixing,formulated speech and specialized words.According to the transcription of 20 courtroom trials of the corruption and bribery cases from the Chinese Court Net,it forms the corpus that this thesis relies on.Taking advantage of the Cooperative Principle,the thesis applies a method combining the qualitative research and quantitative research,to count and analyze the intentions why defendants use the defense utterance from the perspective of that six kinds of defense utterance.In consideration of the special identity of the defendant who is a national staff member in the corruption and bribery cases,we find that the defendants’ violation of the Cooperative Principle is for the sake of pursuing conversational efficiency,hiding adverse information,providing additional information and blowing their streams.Moreover,the final intention is to avoid being convicted or reduce punishment.In order to decrease the situation of escaping sanctions,this thesis presents the suggestions in the macro and micro levels.On the one hand,it should form an incorrupt atmosphere in deepening the construction of the clean government,punishing the corruption severely,and perfecting the system of supervision.On the other hand,the author mainly pays attention to the interrogation skills of the judges and prosecutors.They should make use of the linguistic way of interruption,repetition and asking for a direct answer so as to compel defendants to observe the Cooperative Principle,and then safeguard the judicial justice.Although there are some inevitable limitations,this thesis has enriched the study of forensic linguistics.And the author hopes it will possess a reference value for the future studies.