A Pragmatic Research On Underinformative Responses By The Defendant In Criminal Trials In Chinese Courtroom Setting

This thesis is a pragmatic analysis of underinformative responding in Chinese courtroom setting, seeking to explain the dynamic adaptation in underinformative response production in Chinese trials. Underinformative responding is understood as the dynamic process of providing less information than is required by the initiator literally in the ongoing question-response sequences. Methodologically speaking, this study is a qualitative one based on naturally occurring data from Chinese courtroom records of twenty trials.Developed from Verscheuren's Adaptation Theory, our conceptual framework highlights three components: the nature of initiating acts, communicative needs and contextual correlates. It is contended that the generative mechanism of underinformative responding is derivable from the interplay of these components.It is found that underinformative responses in Chinese courtroom setting are variable along two dimensions, namely, semantic content and covertness of the underinformativeness. Furthermore, the three contextual correlates (physical, social and mental worlds) explored in this study are found to be diversified. While the influence of the physical world on which the responder's choice making is based has to be ignored due to the nature of our data, relations of power and solidarity involved in the social world have unique features in courtroom in that either the power relation or the solidarity relation between utterers and interpreters is relatively static and salient. Consequently they may exert a powerful influence on the choice of underinformative responses. The mental world under discussion covers both the responder's mental world and the audience's mental world, the latter of which has been ignored for a long time in previous studies. Driven by his various psychological motivations, the responder employs underinformative responses with the purpose of realizing or approaching his communicative needs. From the data we find the responders' personalities important to some extent, some of them are more inclined to provide underinformative responses than others. In addition, we explore how the responder adapts to his assessment of the judge's mental world.The present study may shed some light on the study on underinformativeness in general, and may help gain a deeper insight into the nature of courtroom interaction in particular. It is also expected that the study will be conducive to courtroom responders in trial practice, especially witnesses and defendants, as to how to employ various linguistic strategies to achieve communicative goal.