An Analysis Of The Judge’s Interruption In Court Trial From The Perspective Of Discourse Power

Courtroom discourse takes place in a specific place.According to specific procedures and rules,participants with different purposes actively or passively participate in the trial.In order to achieve a result that is in line with their own purposes and interests,participants engage in the trial through mutual persuasion.Interruption,as a unique speech act phenomenon,is one of the most common speech forms in trial discourse.In the process of court trial,the parties involved will unconsciously keep a sense of distance and have a power role,thus forming the strong party represented by the judge,the prosecutor and the lawyer and the weak party represented by the plaintiff,the defendant and the witness.In the past,most of the studies on the phenomenon of interruption in the judicial procedure remain at the static level,showing an unbalanced situation,and there are few studies on the phenomenon of interruption in the trial discourse from the perspective of appraisal theory and its vocal characteristics.Therefore,this paper reveals the dynamic characteristics of judge’s interruptions—the features of pitch,intensity,and length by Praat and tries to discover their pragmatic functions,in order to provide practical suggestions for the judicial practice in China in the future.This paper randomly selects 40 audio-visual corpus of criminal and civil trials from CCTV’s “The Scene of Trial” and uses Praat speech analysis software to conduct quantitative and qualitative analysis of discourse interruptions in the text corpus after transcripts,based on the discourse power theory and the appraisal theory and the speech act theory,exploring the pragmatic functions and the phonetic features of the judge’s interruptions.The study shows that there are three main types of judge’s interruptions: interruptions for clear qualifications,interruptions for limiting content and interruptions for adjusting and controlling speeches and acts.Its pragmatic functions are mainly four kinds: questioning,intervening,verifying and ordering.The judge’s interrupting words during the trial highlight his dominant position;The discourse power theory,the appraisal theory and the speech act theory integrate and explain the inequality of power together.From the perspective of theory,its research value lies in that it is feasible to use the appraisal theory to analyze the judge’s interruption,which provides a certain reference for further research in the future.From the practical level,its research value is that points out the current specific interruption behavior and its characteristics of the judge,for example,the judge’s interruption behavior are mainly interruptions for clear qualifications,interruptions for limiting content and interruptions for adjusting and controlling speeches and acts.The judge usually by interrupting words directly realizes the following four pragmatic functions:questioning,intervening,verifying and ordering.Therefore,this paper has theoretical and practical significance.