Assessing Power And Solidarity

This thesis is a sociolinguistic analysis of address forms in Chinese courtroom setting. Different address forms are used in the Chinese courtroom interaction and they always fall into different patterns. And different social significances, power or solidarity, may be found out by analyzing address forms used in different linguistic and social context. Methodologically speaking, this study is a qualitative one based on naturally occurring data obtained from transcripts of six criminal court trials.Developed from Brown and Gilman's theory of power and solidarity semantic dichotomy of second-person pronouns, our conceptual framework highlights three components: linguistic forms, social context and linguistic context, and social significance. It is contended that meaning generation mechanism of address forms is through the filter of context.It is found that address forms employed in the Chinese courtroom interaction falls into a variety of patterns. And secondly, these address forms alone can tell us nothing about the power and solidarity semantic, we have to resort to the linguistic and social context they are in. The power enjoyed by the judge and the public prosecutor is political power endowed by the relevant judicial institutions. When the public prosecutor, the defendant and his counsel address the judge, they are respectively seeking solidarity with him. And the solidarity falls into two types: (1) intra-subject other-initiated and (2) inter-subject self-initiated.The present study may shed some light on the study on address forms, and may help gain a deeper insight into the nature of courtroom interaction in particular. It is also expected that the discovery of the study will make a contribution to court attendants to some extend. It may be directive and of help to law practitioners, especially judges, public prosecutors and counsels, and...