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Conversation Analysis Of Courtroom Arguments As Institutional Interaction

Posted on:2011-03-31Degree:MasterType:Thesis
Country:ChinaCandidate:L XuFull Text:PDF
GTID:2166330332459007Subject:English Language and Literature
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The researches of institutional discourse in foreign countries have already started since the 1970s, and many pragmatic scholars have been dedicated to the researches of institutional interaction, such as Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson's study over turn-taking. Through the development of almost forty years, the researches on the institutional discourse have got matured and have been applied to many fields, and many new theories have been generated from the application together with other disciplines. Although the domestic research on institutional interaction started a little bit later than the foreign counterparts, a great progress has been made in recent years.As a concerned research object in the field of discourse analysis, courtroom arguments of course possess those basic features of discourse, and therefore Conversation Analysis becomes the preferred methodology in analyzing the courtroom arguments. Conversation Analysis is mainly explanatory analysis on the basis of collection and analysis of a great quantity of data, and then come up with the characteristics of institutional discourse. The advantage of this methodology is that it could on the highest level make the daily happened discourse return to the original condition, however, the basic idea of conversation analysis is what an utterance does in relation to the preceding ones and what implications an utterance poses for the next ones. Thus this kind of explanation could not reflect the motivation on a deeper level, for it focuses more on the relation between sentences. In this thesis the author would strictly transcribe the record in the courtroom and analyze the material with the CA methodology.However, the courtroom arguments is complicated– many non-quantitative variables involved in, such as the relations among participants in the courtroom, setting of the legal procedure etc., leaving quite a lot of uncertainty with the analysis of the courtroom language. Therefore, in the article, the author tries to combine the Speech Act Theory and Gricean Cooperative Principle. One of the most significant features of institutional discourse is that it is oriented by the"task"or"goal", therefore the study over the institutional research could not only have the linguistic significance but also practical meaning. The author hopes that this attempt of combined analysis could provide references for the fair and equitable implementation of law under the current legal environment in China.
Keywords/Search Tags:conversational analysis, institutional interaction, courtroom arguments, turn-taking, asymmetry
PDF Full Text Request
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