Grammatical Metaphor As A Discourse Strategy In Chinese Courts

Grammatical metaphor is defined as "the expression of a meaning through a lexicogrammatical form which originally evolved to express a different kind of meaning" (Thompson 1996:165). Grammatical metaphor is believed to be present and is an important feature in scientific discourse and many other discourse types(Halliday & Christian 2004;朱永生1994). Courtroom discourse is very rich linguistic resources of grammatical metaphor. This study intends to examine courtroom discourse from the perspective of grammatical metaphor.This study is data-driven. A small-scale corpus consisting of the audio records of 7 real courtroom trials taking place in Beijing, Shanghai and Wuhan is built. Both civil and criminal cases are included. The strict transcription according the transcribing rules of Prof. Liao Meizhen results in a total data of about 250 thousand words. Based on the data, the subtypes and features of grammatical metaphor in Chinese courtroom discourse are analyzed and the distribution patterns of grammatical metaphor types revealed some of the power relationship between the participants in the courtroom discourse.Past research literature on courtroom institutional discourse and grammatical metaphor are reviewed. The task of courtroom discourse analysis has drawn attention from many disciplines such as conversation analysis, discourse analysis, sociolinguistics and critical discourse analysis. Since the launch of the theory of grammatical metaphor by Halliday, the concept of grammatical metaphor has been continuously refined, extended and even criticized by many scholars, especially in the Systemic Functional Linguisitcs (henceforth SFL) circle. The achievements in the research of a closely related domain, i.e., that of lexical grammar are also examined. The study of pragmatic strategy is a newly established one. Current researches in this field mainly draw great resources from existing pragmatic theories such as Cooperative Principle, Politeness Principle and deixis etc. Although phenomena such as turn-taking (刘森林2007) are also treated as pragmatic strategy, there exist no literature yet, consider the potential of grammatical metaphor as pragmatic strategy.The methodology adopted in this paper is both descriptive and interpretive. It is descriptive because different types of grammatical metaphor are to be described and specific features of their instances are to be analyzed. It is interpretive because the functions of the particular grammatical metaphor in that context are to be interpreted in terms of goal attainment.Courtroom discourse is typical institutional discourse. Strong goal-orientation is characteristic of courtroom discourse. In the field, Prof. Liao Meizhen (2002; 2003; 2004; 2005; 2006; 2008) has convincingly proved that The Principle of Goal-direction can better explain what happens in the court than Cooperative Principle and the Principle of Politeness and proposed Goal Analysis as a new way of doing pragmatics. As a means to attain goals, the pragmatic strategies adopted by different speaker directly affect the actual configuration of actual discourse (Gu Yueguo 2009:132). This is what makes institutional discourse rich in contextual features which include the power relations between speakers and their social status.The analysis of the data reveals that the prosecutors and judges tend to use certain types of grammatical metaphor and defendants and witnesses, other types of grammatical metaphor. One possible explanation is Goal analysis. In other words, they are motivated by different goals. Grammatical metaphor is just the pragmatic strategy they adopted to attain their goals because different grammatical metaphors have different semantic potentials to negotiate interpersonal relationships.