A Study On The Narrative Confrontations Between The Prosecution Party And The Defense Party In Criminal Courtroom Discourse

In criminal trials,the judges shall ascertain the case facts to make their judgment.However,the cases usually happened in the past,so judges need to deduce and determine actual facts of cases based on the legal norms and evidence chains constructed by verbal narration and written evidence given by the prosecution party and the defense party in court.Therefore,narration plays a very important role in courtroom discourse.Due to differences in their goals,identities,and social roles,the prosecution party and the defense party will make different language choices under different levels of salience.To be specific,the two sides will choose different narrative elements to construct their narration,which results in great differences and even narrative confrontations between the narrative versions of the two sides.Taking the courtroom discourse of the case of Zhang Koukou’s intentional homicide and vandalism as an example,this thesis is intended to investigate the phenomenon of the narrative confrontations between the prosecution party and the defense party at different narrative levels by means of qualitative and quantitative methods from the perspectives of narrative elements,salience mechanism,adaption to the context with the help of the software KH coder.Through analysis,it can be found that the narrative confrontations between the narratives of the two sides are obvious and the narrative confrontations between the two sides mainly occur at the investigation stage and the debate stage of the trial.The public prosecutor,as the representative of the people’s procuratorate,has the responsibility of punishing criminals and defending the dignity of the law.As the agent of the defendant,the defense attorney stands in the defendant’s position,trying to prove the innocence of the defendant or fighting for the mitigation.Because of different social roles,the salience degree of the two sides is different when they experience mental processes such as “perception and expression”,“planning” to make language choices.At different levels of narrative,the prosecution party and the defense party choose to use different narrative elements and strategies to construct their narrative versions under different levels of salience,thus adapting to the context and achieving their respective pragmatic functions.At the investigation stage,the narratives of the two sides are composed of the interrogations of the public prosecutor and the defense attorney to the defendant and the defendant’s answers.The narrative contents of the two sides are quite different.The prosecution party focuses on the fact of the defendant’s homicide and adapts to the social world,thus realizing the confirmation function.The defense attorney adapts to the mental world and attaches great importance to the defendant’s motive for the murder,thus realizing the explanation function.At the cross-examination stage,the narrative of the prosecution party is composed of the evidence that they provide in the courtroom.The public prosecutor uses various narrative perspectives to construct the evidence chain.The defense attorney employs strategies such as widening the pragmatic distance to break the chain of evidence constructed by the opposite side.At the debate stage,the two sides choose to use different strategies such as different narrative themes,temporal organization,narrative tone and reported voices to achieve their purposes.The public prosecutor adapts to the social and physical world more to realize the education and condemnation function.The defense attorney prefers to adapt to the mental world to realize the persuasive function.This thesis endeavors to provide a new angle for the research on courtroom discourse in China and hopefully to make a little contribution to the fair and just judicial practice.