Overinformative Responding In Chinese Courtroom Setting: A Pragmatic Approach

This thesis is a pragmatic analysis of overinformative responding in Chinese courtroom setting, seeking to explain the dynamic adaptation in overinformative response production in Chinese trials. Overinformative responding is understood as the dynamic process of providing additional or added information apart from the information literally necessary to the initiator's satisfaction in the ongoing question-response courtroom trial. Methodologically speaking, this study is a qualitative one based on naturally occurring data obtained from Chinese courtroom records of twenty trials.Developed from Verscheuren's Adaptation Theory, our conceptual framework highlights three components: the nature of initiating acts, communicative needs and contextual correlates. It is contented that the generative mechanism of overinformative responding is derivable from the interplay of these components.It is found that overinformative response in Chinese courtroom setting is variable along three dimensions, namely propositional content, discourse property and information quantity. In all cases, the provision of any single instance of overinformative response is shaped by all the contextual variables. Furthermore, the three contextual correlates (physical, social and mental worlds) explored in this study are found to be diversified. While the influence of the physical world on the responder's choice making has to be ignored due to the nature of our data, relations of power and solidarity involved in the social world have unique features in courtroom setting in that either the power relation or the solidarity relation between utterers and interpreters is relatively static and salient. Consequently they may exert a powerful influence on the choice of overinformative responses. The mental world under discussion covers both the responder's mental world and the audience's mental world, the latter of which has been ignored for a long time inprevious studies. Driven by his various psychological motivations, the responder employs overinformative responses with the purpose of realizing or approaching his communicative needs. In addition, we explore how the responder adapts to his assessment of the judge's mental world.The present study may shed some light on the study on overinformativeness in general, and may help gain a deeper insight into the nature of courtroom interaction in particular. It is also expected that the study will be conducive to courtroom responders in trial practice, especially witnesses and defendants, as to how to employ various linguistic strategies to achieve communicative goals.