A Corpus Study On Pragmatic Presuppositions In Courtroom Cross Examination

There is a clear pragmatic purpose in trial discourse,for which different parties in court will accordingly adopt some pragmatic strategies to achieve their goal.Pragmatic presupposition is one of the effective pragmatic strategies,with the following three properties: tied to specific surface structure,defeasible in certain discourse contexts and anti-negation.Presupposition can be identified by presupposition triggers and can be cancelled by the speaker through contradictory information in the context or by its contradiction to the background information.The anti-negation of pragmatic presupposition means it could remain intact in a negation environment.This determines that pragmatic presupposition can be used to treat inaccurate information as facts and present it to the audience.When the audience has knowledge of what has really happened,this presupposition will be cancelled.However,in courtroom crossexamination,the jury does not have a clear understanding of the facts related to the case.Therefore,if the witness cannot properly deny the false information in the presupposition,the false information will be accepted by the jury as a fact and finally affects the jury’s understanding of the incident.This paper builds a monolingual corpus based on the transcript of a one-and-ahalf-year-long criminal trial.On account of classifying the corpus according to its pragmatic purpose,this paper annotates the types of pragmatic presupposition,question types,and whether the form of witnesses’ answers abide by the question’s grammatical form and so on.By learning how these factors affect the validity of pragmatic presupposition,this paper aims to provide a reference for the use of pragmatic strategy in courtroom discourse.Specifically,on the basis of Levinson’s presupposition classification model,this paper studies whether the witness’ s understanding of different types of presupposition is consistent by analyzing the effects brought by different types of presupposition on the logical form of their responses,which is to see whether the logical form of the answers abides by the grammatical form of their questions.The result shows that the logical form of responses to questions with presupposition tends to comply with the grammatical form of their questions less.The degree to which the logical form of the responses is influenced varies among different types of pragmatic presupposition.This shows that witness has a different understanding of different types of presupposition.Relying on the same model,the paper also studies the controlling ability of different types of pragmatic presupposition over witnesses.By analyzing whether the response of the witnesses could deny the pragmatic presupposition,this study finds differences in the controlling ability among different types of pragmatic presupposition,with factive verb being the most controlling.Further analysis shows that the information embedded in various types of presupposition often differs in its attributes.Such distinction is one of the reasons that affect the controlling ability of different types of pragmatic presupposition.Based on Gibbons’ framework of courtroom pragmatic strategies,this paper studies how counsels use pragmatic strategies to convey the negated information to the jury after the witness successfully negates their pragmatic presuppositions.The result shows that contrast and repetition are the most frequently used pragmatic strategies by counsels after the pragmatic presupposition is denied.Besides,the pragmatic strategies are not used alone but in combination with various complementary pragmatic strategies,such as vocabulary choice and reformulation.