| This thesis aims to explore meta-pragmatic awareness of both legal professionals (the judge, the prosecutor and the lawyer) and laypersons (the defendant) by analyzing the phenomenon of pragmatic vagueness in Chinese courtroom discourse on the basis of transcripts of ten trial recordings with more than 100,000 words. Both qualitative and quantitative analysis are made on the data collected, that is to say, firstly, based on the definition of "pragmatic vagueness", all the sentences containing this phenomenon are identified. Secondly, these sentences are categorized at different linguistic levels. Therefore, we easily find out which realization form of pragmatic vagueness is mostly used and which the least used. Besides that we get an accurate idea about who uses this strategy mostly and who the least. Finally, we make a table of statistical figures of pragmatic vagueness employed by different types of speakers in their discourse, which helps us dig out various speakers'meta-pragmatic awareness behind adopting pragmatic vagueness as a strategy.It is found that (1) pragmatic vagueness in Chinese courtroom discourse can mainly be realized at lexical and semantic levels, including forms of fuzziness, vagueness, generality, ambiguity, hedges, deixis, contradictory propositions in one sentence and irrelevant answer to the question; (2) the defendant uses the largest number of pragmatically vague forms, and the prosecutor takes the second place with the lawyer following up. The most frequently used vague form is hedges, and then fuzziness and generality; (3) meta-pragmatic awareness of different parties involved in court varies from one to another:for the judge and the prosecutor who share the same features in using pragmatic vagueness, their meta-pragmatic awareness is to be a symbol of justice and to be equitable to every party in the trial. For the lawyer, they employ pragmatic vagueness as a strategy in court all for their litigant's sake. That is to say, if the litigant intends to win the case, then the lawyer's discourse reflects the meta-pragmatic awareness of winning the case; if the litigant intends a lighter penalty, the lawyer's discourse reflects that intention. For the defendant, their meta-pragmatic awareness reflected in pragmatic vagueness is either to get a lighter penalty, or to escape legal punishment.The findings transmit the information that (1) the judge and the prosecutor can consciously identify the lawyer's and the defendant's meta-pragmatic awareness by analyzing the use of the strategy of pragmatic vagueness. When the judge and the prosecutor could quickly come to understand the communicative purposes of those people, a right judgment about the case would be made by the judge, or an argument would be delivered by the prosecutor to rebut the other party's idea in time; (2) there is a negative effect when the judge and the prosecutor misuse the strategy of pragmatic vagueness. Here we mean the form of ambiguity, which may result in confusion among the responder, and waste much time to explain the question. What is worse, under the circumstances that the responder understands the real meta-pragmatic awareness behind the misuse of ambiguity; he may even deliberately make use of it to the opposite end, which may cause much trouble and should be avoided by both the judge and the prosecutor. |
