A Critical Analysis Of Chinese Courtroom Discourse

This thesis analyzes Chinese courtroom discourse from the perspective of Critical Discourse Analysis for the purpose of describing the formal features of Chinese courtroom discourse and revealing their interaction with the ideologies of and power relations between the subjects in the courtroom (i.e., the judge, the public prosecutor, the plaintiff, and the defendant, etc.). Fairclough's three-dimensional framework for Critical Discourse Analysis is employed to analyze the audio recording transcripts of eight court trials (four criminal, three civil, and one administrative), which amount to more than 200,000 words. The first dimension "Discourse as text" describes features and underlying meanings of the following aspects: classification, transitivity, modality and interactional control features. It is found that 1) in the courtroom, due to different purposes and ideologies of the subjects, words and expressions that have different and even opposite meanings are used to describe or refer to the same thing or incident, 2) material and verbal processes appear by far most frequently, while the number of existential processes is the smallest, 3) generally speaking, those expressions of modality employed by the judges help to clarify rights and duties and realize the functions of regulation, permission, authorization and prohibition, while those employed by other subjects generally have a negative effect on the reliability of their statements and the accuracy of the meanings they want to express; 4) courtroom interaction is generally controlled by the powerful (the judge in all trials, the judge and the public prosecutor in criminal ones). Occasionally, the non-powerful tries to challenge the authority of the powerful, but in such cases, the powerful will try to reassert his/her control' in various ways.The second dimension "Discursive Practice" interprets courtroom discourse in relation to its production, distribution, and consumption through the analysis of force, coherence and intertextuality. Under the rubric of force, "speech acts" and "politeness" are analyzed. Among the five-part classification of speech acts established by Searle (1965), representative and directive speech acts are most frequently used. With regard to politeness, generally speaking, less politeness strategies are adopted by the subjects in the courtroom than in daily conversations. The more powerful a subject is, the more "impolite" s/he tends to be, that is, s/he tends to do more FTAs (Face-Threatening Acts). As the most powerful subject in the courtroom, the judge does FTAs most frequently. The second aspect is coherence. The analysis of two cases shows that courtroom discourse is coherent semantically, topically, and contextually. Following professor Xin Bin (2000a, 2005), the third aspect "intertextuality" is classified into specific and generic intertextuality. In the analysis of specific intertextuality, it is found that 1) among the three ways of showing news source: specific and exact news source, implicit news source, and seemingly real news source, only the first two are used by the subjects in the court trials, while the third is not found and 2) among the four major modes of speech reporting: Direct Reporting (DR), Indirect Reporting (IR), Free Indirect Reporting (FIR), and Narrative Report of Speech Act (NRSA), only DR, IR, NRSA appear in the eight cases. It should be pointed out that the choice of ways of showing news source and modes of speech reporting is in accordance with the purposes and interests of the subjects in the courtroom. The analysis of generic intertextuality shows that courtroom discourse, especially the sub-genre of "evidence-producing", is not only the mixture of different genres but also that of different modes (styles), which may be the result of the judicial reform and a manifestation of the trend of 'conversationalization' in contemporary society.The third dimension "social practice" explains the courtroom discourse from the perspective of how power relations are either reproduced, challenged, or restructured through the ideological common sense assumptions of those controlling the discourse. In the courtroom, the ideologies of the subjects have two major tendencies: convergence and conflict. The convergence of ideologies mainly exists between the judge and the public prosecutor, because in the courtroom both of them are the embodiment of certain institutions: the judge embodies the court (the judicial organ), while the public prosecutor embodies the procuratorate (the organ for legal supervision). Another tendency is the conflict of the ideologies. The major conflicts are those between the public prosecutor (and the judge) and the defendant in criminal trials, and those between opposing parties (the plaintiff and the defendant, the appellant and the appellee, etc.) in civil and administrative ones. Generally speaking, opposing parties in the courtroom tend to have different ideologies due to their different purposes and interests. In the courtroom, power relations have the following three main characteristics: 1) the power relations of the subjects in the courtroom are hierarchical and asymmetrical; 2) the power relations are largely determined by the institutional nature of the court; and 3) the power relations are reflected by and in turn affect the linguistic features of the subject discourse.