A Study On Questioner's Reformulation In Chinese Adversarial Courtroom Cross-Examination

Cross-Examination is the phase of courtroom trial characterized by fierce conflicts. It is regarded as an effective and efficient way of eliciting the truth from the defendant. In the process of Cross-Examination, the lawyer/prosecutor and the defendant both strive to construct their favored version of story through questions and answers respectively.Cross-Examination is heatedly discussed in recent pragmatic research for its language of wisdom and glamour. The paper focuses on reformulation in Cross-Examination, which is to represent the defendant's answer in the particular manner so as to remedy unexpected answers and reconstruct the crime story along the lawyer/prosecutor's favored line. The motives for selecting reformulation as the researching object lie in two aspects: first, although rich and profound previous research has been made on Cross-Examination to explore the coerciveness of the lawyer/prosecutor's language, the focus is put on investigating the relation between questioning type and its coerciveness, while reformulation as an effective way of exerting control over the defendant's version of crime story is a corner almost ignored. Therefore, we hope to bridge the gap through this tentative research. Second, in Cross-Examination, it is usually by way of questioning that the lawyer/prosecutor elicits relevant expected answers on crime facts from the defendant and presents the whole crime story for the jury for their final decision. However, reformulation can be an important as well as indispensable aiding tool for questions. When confronted with unfavorable and unexpected answers from the defendant, the lawyer/prosecutor can exploit reformulation to represent, remedy information delivered by the defendant thus reconstruct the crime story. To summarize, the study on reformulation in Cross-Examination is of theoretical and practical implication.The paper summarizes the pragmatic functions of reformulation on the basis of analyzing data collected from three criminal courtroom trial and of 300,000 Chinese characters. The purpose is to explore the linguistic mechanism underlying the production of reformulation from the perspective of psycholinguistics and to reveal for the lawyer/prosecutor the nature of reformulation so that they can better understand and use it strategically. We hope the study can facilitate the lawyer/prosecutor's skillful operationof reformulation so as to bring Cross-Examination into full play.The theoretical frame of this paper is that of the language planning of psycholinguistics. We develop the research in the frame together with related theories of linguistics, psycholinguistics and discourse analysis, with the focus on investigating the production mechanism of reformulation. We find that the linguistic features, the structure and the pragmatic functions of reformulation is determined through the choice made in the process of production on different levels of language, from macro aspect to that of micro. It is the language planning the lawyer/prosecutor makes on reformulation from various levels that makes it possible for the features of reformulation and its functions to reconstruct the crime story given by the defendant. The study demonstrates that the lawyer/prosecutor reconstruct the crime facts through the unconventional choice of language on different levels, including the intentional choice of low accessibility referring expression to introduce into reformulation the reformulated objects;the choice of thematic structure which shares the same sequence of information arrangement as that of the defendant's reformulated answer but differ in information content;the choice of leading and coercive questions to make assertions;the choice of words similar in the form but different in information content.The paper tends to expand the research of language in Cross-Examination with the hope to provide practical guide and implication for the legal practitioners.