Hearing The Words Of The Judge Identity Building

The linguistic turn in Western Philosophy during the20th century has also made thefocusing of law studies primarily on the relationship between language and law. Anincreasing number of legal professionals and law experts have attached great importance tothe study of language with a view to studying law and solving problems in legal practicethrough doing research on language. Thus, a new discipline—forensic linguistics, theinterface study between language and law, comes into being. Numerous studies on variousaspects of legal language have been carried out under the heading of forensic linguistics.Among the current research topics in forensic linguistics, courtroom discourse, thecharacteristics of which are of great peculiarity in its language use, has become focus ofresearch. Several major studies on language use in court trials have been done, but most ofthe studies, which are greatly influenced by the traditional linguistic paradigm, mainlyfocus on the lexical, syntactic or stylistic characteristics of courtroom discourse, and havepaid little attention to the spontaneity and dynamism of language use in court. In addition,since these studies are mostly done under Anglo-American adversarial legal system, theyaddress more particularly the interaction between lawyers and witnesses, whereas othercourtroom-defined speaking roles, especially the role of judge, have little been touchedupon.In fact, the judge, the core of various relationships among court participants, plays acentral role in court proceedings. How the judge takes charge of the court with linguisticrepertoire and what role the judge plays in court are essential to understanding rolerelationships among court participants, and further the general judicial system in China. Inspite of the crucial role the judge plays in court trials, little work in literature on courtroomdiscourse has focused on the linguistic practice or the identity of the judge in court. Forthis reason, it would be useful to look at the role or the identity of the judge in the wholelegal proceedings to understand what role the judge identifies with.Based on a social constructionist view on identity, this dissertation, drawing uponsome analytical categories in Systemic-Functional Grammar(SFG), ConversationAnalysis(CA) and Pragmatics, tries to set out a multidimensional theoretical framework forthe construction of the judge identity from three perspectives: grammatical, textual andpragmatic. The methods of analysis are characterized by an integration of quantitativedescription as well as qualitative explanation, and all the data to be examined in thedissertation are taken from transcripts of court trials in local courts of China, covering boththe criminal, civil and administrative first-instance cases. A multidimensional approach to the construction of the judge identity has producedfruitful results:First, in terms of grammatical dimension, the judge constructs himself or herself moreas an organizer, a dominator, a listener and a fact-finder through strategically makingchoices in mood type and a tactful control of the number of clauses. In addition, thegeneral characteristics of modality choice in the judge’s discourse have revealed that thejudge does not show much personal opinion, attitude or affection towards the casepresented at court, and he or she wants to construct himself or herself more as an impartialreferee.Second, under the heading of textual dimension, it is found that the turn-takingmechanism in courtroom discourse is featured by asymmetry. These asymmetricalcharacteristics of turn-taking system manifest the hierarchical relations among courtparticipants and an imbalance of power in courtroom discourse, where the judge enjoys themost power and constructs himself or herself as the dominator of the court trial. In addition,the judge constructs and strengthens his or her identity as a listener through strategicallymanipulating the turn length.Third, through a detailed quantitative description and qualitative interpretation of(im)politeness strategies at pragmatic level, it is found that the judge constructs his or heridentity more as an impartial and neutral referee through little use of positive(im)politeness strategies, and in the meantime, the judge exercises his or her judicial powerand builds himself or herself as a dominator through a tactful use of negative(im)politeness strategies.The exploration of the judge’s identity as a dominator, an organizer, a listener, a fact-finder as well as an impartial referee has, in some way, increased our understanding of thecurrent Chinese judicial system: a mixture of adversarial system and inquisitorial system,with the former taking the major part and the latter the minor part.The study has some theoretical and practical contributions. It has confirmed ourprevious view on identity and extended the scope of identity study to institutionaldiscourse, which offers a supplement to the previous identity studies. It is also a generalexploration into the legal practice and the role of the judge in Chinese court trials from alinguistic perspective, which provides another possible means of understanding andexamining the current Chinese judicial system.