A Study On Courtroom Speech

As one form of legal implementation, courtroom trials are the most important legal activities, for the results of courtroom trials, namely, adjudications or decisions, will involve the stakes of the life of the accused, the properties and reputations of the plaintiff and the defendant; hence the theoretical and practical significance of the research on courtroom speech.Austin and Searle claim in their speech act theories that to speak is to act; that is, people tend to perform certain acts, directly or indirectly, through the utterance of their speech. The courtroom trial, in the current essay, is viewed as a macro-speech act under which speech act sequences are grouped together to serve the speech act functions of, mainly, demanding, declaring, information securing, confirming, fact or opinion stating, requesting, persuading, referring, etc. In general, courtroom discourse is a formal discourse type featured by its objectivity in the statement of facts and the avoidance of subjective bias in language uses, mainly of questioning, statements, debates, declarations, and clarifications.As stipulated in the procedural law in China, a courtroom trial is procedurally initiated by the declaration of the subject matter,which, serving as the topic of courtroom discourse, reveals what the case is about; seconded by the courtroom examinations that aim to identify legal facts, with all the discourse at this stage centering around the investigating and examining of related evidential facts; followed by the courtroom debates where the applicability of specific laws to the identified legal facts; which leads to a stage of final arguments for judges to confirm, after evidencing and debating, the final opinions of both the plaintiff and the defendant in a civil case and those of the prosecutor, the advocate and the accused in a criminal case;and concluded by the declaration of the court decision, signaling the completion of an institutionalized instance of courtroom discourse. Furthermore, each of the above transactions also consists of two or more exchange sequences. For example, the discourse or speech organized around the examination of each testimony is in fact one such sequence made of several exchanges, which in turn are further specified into turns.Social-cultural contexts are of importance in the courtroom speech event, and more important, contextual factors, such as the physical settings of the courtroom, discourse roles, topics, and time in the courtroom speech event, are highly institutionalized to characterize the courtroom speech as an institutional discourse. In courtroom speech activities, communication can be successfully...