A Study Of Interruption Behaviors In Courtroom Interaction

The courtroom hearing is perceived as the adversarial verbal interaction among different parties. According to the provision of the law, each case is held through five steps: (1) the opening of the trial; (2) court investigation; (3) court debate; (4) final statement; and (5) deliberation and judgment.Although each stage is crucial to the overall process, the court investigation and court debate steps are usually perceived to be the core of the trial process, an arena of opposition and drama. It is these stages that have attracted the greatest attention from those legal and linguistic observers concerned with the distribution of power, and with language strategies.This study investigates the interaction happening in a Chinese courtroom, focusing on how and why litigant parties are interrupted by the judges. The aim of this study is to describe interruption in courtroom interactions and demonstrates how interruptions are triggered in the legal context.Firstly, the present author demonstrates a historical review on the turn-taking model proposed by Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson, and the studies on institutional discourse. Based on such two flows of conversation analysis, the present author proposes that in the courtroom interaction the judge's role include: (1) turn-allocation, (2) control the turn size, and (3) turn mediation.Secondly, following Ferguson, Murray and Watts' analysis, four types of interruptions are identified in courtroom interaction, namely butting-in interruption, overlap, silent interruption and simple interruption. Lastly, the thesis endeavor to study causes, places and methods of the interruption in the courtroom interaction. The study also shows that judges frequently use interruptions to achieve their communicative purposes in the will of ensuring the safe-going of the courtroom interactions. Interruptions help them to maintain their control over the other courtroom interactants, to protect the hearings from digressions and also to convey the judge's attitude towards the interactants in the argument.