Presupposition In Courtroom Questioning: An Adaptation-Relevance Model

Presupposition,a constantly discussed linguistic phenomenon,is one of the focuses for philosophical and linguistic studies.Since the notion of presupposition was first introduced in 1892 by the German philosopher Gottlob Frege,this phenomenon has long been the concern of philosophers,logicians and linguists and there has been an extensive literature on presupposition over the last forty years.The previous studies of presupposition have made it clear that presupposition is too context-sensitive to be studied independently of its actual use in the communication.In the actual communication,presupposition is not a pure linguistic phenomenon concerning only the linguistic construction,but is rather a basic link in the construction in which the communicator can exert his/her subjectivity.In courtroom questioning,there are abundant presuppositions.Presupposition is a linguistic strategy adopted by lawyers to manipulate the witness' answers and win the advantage in the trial.In courtroom questioning,lawyers will adapt to the witness' contexts and presuppose the truth of a fact;in direct examination the presupposed fact benefits the witness while in cross-examination it goes against the witness.And the judge and jury's judgement of the witness' answers will be processed in the presupposed context and thereby affected by it.Pragmatic presuppositions are predicted by presupposition triggers at phonetic,lexical/phrasal,syntactic and discoursal levels.Therefore presuppositions are closely related to the progress of the trial,restricted by the contexts and vary with their changes.This thesis attempts to study the manipulation of meaning through the use of presuppositions by lawyers in the competing courtroom examination.It focuses on the explanation of the generation and interpretation in lawyers' application of presupposition by means of an Adaptation-Relevance model(i.e.the A-R model).To be specific,how lawyers in courtroom questioning produces presuppositions relevance-oriented to the specific context in a dynamic adaptive process is discussed and the metapragmatic awareness dominating this dynamic behaviour is indicated.This thesis consists of six chapters.They are organized as follows:Chapter One serves as the introduction of the thesis.In this part,the rationale and the significance of the research,the data collection and methodology and the structure of the thesis are clearly listed.Chapter Two is the literature review on previous studies of forensic linguistics and presupposition.Besides,relevant studies of presupposition in forensic linguistics are also reviewed and assessed.Chapter Three outlines the main approaches—Theory of Adaptation(AT) and Relevance Theory(RT)—applied in analyzing presupposition and they are integrated into an A-R model for presupposition.Chapter Four is a case study of the presuppositions in two extracts of O.J.Simpson Trial transcripts under the A-R model. In this chapter,the specific process of the generation and interpretation of presupposition is detailed with examples from this case.Chapter Five revisits the presuppositions in courtroom questioning under the adaptive-relevant theoretic framework,with the hope to further explicate the generation and interpretation of presuppositions at a theoretic level. Last but not least,Chapter Six,the conclusion,sums up the main findings in the thesis, meanwhile proposes some enlightenment for judicial practice to apply the presupposition in courtroom questioning correctly and efficiently and finally points out the limitations of this research and advances some suggestions for future researches.