| This thesis is a pragmatic analysis of overinformativeness in Chinese civil courtroom setting, seeking to explain the dynamic adaptation in overinformativeness production in Chinese civil trials. Overinformativeness in this research will be understood as the process of providing additional or added information apart from the information literally necessary to the speaker's satisfaction in courtroom. Methodologically speaking, this study is a qualitative one based on naturally occurring data obtained from Chinese civil courtroom records of fourteen trials.Developed from Verschueuren's Linguistic 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 overinformativeness is derivable from the interplay of these components.This thesis studies the overinformativeness from two aspects: (1) the adaptability of overinformativeness in civil courtroom; (2) the functionality of overinformativeness in civil courtroom.Firstly, overinformativeness does not occur in a vacuum. Like other kinds of language use, it is contextually dependent. Chinese civil courtroom is a special context. We describe the adaptability of overinformativeness from two aspects: one is the adaptability of the judge's overinformativenss, the other is the adaptability of the parties' overinformativeness. Not only the judge but also the parties all utilize the contextual resources in the provision of additional information so as to satisfy their communicative needs in a more effective way. The judge is generally found to adapt their speech to the contextual correlates, which are social world, physical world and mental world. The parties are generally found to adapt their speech to the contextual correlates, which are social world, physical world and mental world. From the two aspects, we can better view the speaker's sense of appropriateness in... |
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