The Relevance Theory And Courtroom Discourse

This thesis intends to bring Relevance Theory into the analysis of courtroom discourse.By the application and explanations,I try to explore the cognitive proceedings in a courtroom trial for better understanding of courtroom activities.Forensic linguistics,as a peripheral subject,has attracted more and more attention from diverse intellectual backgrounds.And courtroom discourse study-reasonably becomes the kernel of the study by many researchers.Conley(1998), O'Barr(1998),Matoesian(1994),and Maley(1994) all choose courtroom discourse as their central topic of research.Their efforts are primarily put on the pragmatic and social context of courtroom discourse.Few of them have touched upon the cognitive proceedings in their researches.That is why we bring Relevance Theory into the analysis of courtroom discourse.Relevance Theory(RT),presented fully by Sperber＆Wilson in their work Relevance:Communication and Cognition(1986/1995) is a new approach to pragmatics,studying human communication and utterance understanding based on the cognitive perspective in dynamic contexts,which is applied to the study of conversations.And here the author chooses courtroom conversations in art works to analyze.By analyzing the selected conversations in art works based on the relevance-theoretical communication model,the author hopes that this thesis does help to display the activities in the courtroom.This thesis is also an attempt to testify the practicability and applicability of RT theory in the analysis of courtroom conversations.Communication,the core and premise in the comprehension of relevance theory, according to Sperber and Wilson's(1986/1995),is an ostensive-inferential process involving informative intention and communicative intention.Ostension and inference is the two aspects of the same communication process,in which the communicator deals with ostension while the audience with inference.Communication under relevance theory is the combination of both the code model and the inferential model. Relevance theory believes that communication is a kind of cognitive act and that the mutual manifestness of the cognitive environments is the basis of successful communication.The cognitive environment is the combination of a set of facts and assumptions people have in mind,and the success of communication is relevance-oriented.The relevance in RT is relative for it is influenced by both condition of contextual effect and the effort made by the hearer in utterance understanding.The assumption is optimal relevant if it can achieve enough contextual effect with the smallest processing effort.Optimal relevance is the effect that is expected in verbal communication.And contextual assumption is another name of context in relevance theory,which plays an important role in communication.Courtroom discourse in a courtroom trial provides us with a good platform to carry out Relevance Theory.When lawyers create witty questions,witnesses give answers,and other participants makes responses,they all unavoidably undergo a series of cognitive processes.This thesis chose the relevance theory to analyze courtroom conversations from the cognitive aspect.The relevance theory,through its framework not only helps us to know about the tactic of questioning in the court,but also offers us the theoretical ground to know about the courtroom activities.The combination of Relevance Theory with courtroom discourse must create a novel perspective both for the research of Relevance Theory and for the research of courtroom discourse.