The Intentionality Principle And The Proto-Typicality Of Reported Speech In Criminal Trials

Judicial has become an integral part of modern life, in which the use of reported speeches is of high frequency and great significance.Court trial is a process in which all is presumably judged on presented facts and the law is taken as the only criterion. No matter what forms the ’facts’ and ’criteria’ may initially take, they are presented in language.Within the framework of Speech Act Theory and the Intentionality Principle, and on the basis of300,000-word raw corpora of court trials, this dissertation studies reported speeches in criminal trials, aiming to reveal the distinctive features of court reports and building a theoretical framework for analyzing reported speeches.Previous studies have either focused on the forms or functions of reported speeches. The former centers around the faithfulness of the reported speech in form and meaning, and the latter has been best illustrated by Thompson’s (1996) analysis of the definition and defining factors of reported speech. What these studies share in common is that they have all focused on static discourses like news reports, literary discourses, and academic discourses, but have more or less neglected the dynamics and variability of form-function correspondences in reported speeches. Besides, due to the differences in discourse genres, existing research findings can hardly be applied to the analysis of real life reported speech data like court trial transcripts.This dissertation focuses on reported speeches in legal languages from a speech act perspective. Within the framework of speech act theory and intentionality principle, the author aims to build a dynamic event frame that could guide the analysis of reported speeches in the criminal trial processes.After a careful examination of three key concepts of’Speech Acts’,’Field’and ’Reported Speech’ and their applications in the analysis of reported speeches in court trials, the author proposes that:(1) Any acts presented by language are speech acts, and any speech act is an echo of participants’ intentionality, hence the importance of the intentionality principle;(2) All texts of reported speeches are speech acts with selective purposes for particular perlocutionary effects;(3)’Filed’ is relevant but not equal to the concepts of ’context’ or ’register’. It mainly refers to a setting in which agents and their social positions are located. The position of each particular agent in the field is a result of interactions between the specific rules of the field, agents’ habitus and positions (social, economic and cultural). The significance of a message and its social effectiveness could only be determined within a particular ’field’ embedded in a network closely related to other’fields’.(4) Last but not least, a reported speech is not just one speech about another. The essence of reported speeches should be defined as ’an event that is employed by speech participants to realize a specific intentionality’.Based on the above proposed analytic framework, the dissertation explores the parameters that define and mold the event of reported speech. It is found that court trials are typically "online", dynamic and interactive, which distinguishes court reported speeches from other static discourses like literature, academic articles and news reports. This further restrains the discourse structure and discourse markers.In court trials, speech acts are not ’monologues’ or ’dialogues’, but interactive negotiations among the defense, the prosecutor, and the court judges. The defense and the prosecutor do not mean to convince each other but to convince a third party-the judge and the jury.In court, speakers’intentions can be divided into two types:cooperation and confrontation. Accordingly, reported speeches in criminal trials are labeled as "affirmative" or "negative"Moreover, direct and indirect speeches carry different meanings in the court trial processes. Direct speeches are not employed to be faithful but to be emotionally provoking, while indirect speeches are applied to maximize the speakers’ benefits by selective presentation of facts. In court, all facts are determined by reporting and the reporters should take their own responsibility for what they report. Therefore, court reported speech, whether it is affirmative or negative, will assume corresponding legal responsibility, a distinctive feature which makes reported speeches in court different from those in other genres such as literature, news reports and academic articles.The basic connections between reported speech and the original speech are their relevance. The choices of the relevant routes are determined by specific purposes of the speech acts, to achieve the effectiveness of ’intentionality’. What is in common among different registers of reported speeches is also the relevance between the reported and the original speeches. The difference between court reported speeches and other types of reported speeches is mainly that of manners and routes of relevance, or, in other words, it’s a matter of parameter profiling or suspension. All examinations of reported speeches could be made within the framework of intentionality principle on the basis of event frames and relevance relations between reported and original speeches.In this research, the author has tried to build an event frame of reported speech, which is composed of different speech acts. As contexts vary, speakers could profile or suspend some of the parameters, and make a total different form-function correspondence. The parameters include:the source of the message, the faithfulness of the message, the amount and the scope of the message, the context and the manners of media, etc.