A Study Of The Statements Of Defense In Chinese Criminal Court Trial From The Perspective Of Linguistic Adaptation Theory

As a part of legal documents, the statements of defense in Chinese criminal court trial are presented with three fundamental purposes: the informative purpose to construct the truth, the argumentative purpose to refute the charges and the persuasive purpose to convince the judges and jury to make beneficial decisions for the defendants. Among them, persuasion is the ultimate purpose of the statements of defense because its defense function comes into effect only when it is adopted by the court.This paper is to explore the Linguistic Adaptation Theory proposed by Jef Verschueren to probe into the linguistic features in the statement of defense in Chinese criminal court trial from the three dimensions: the contextual adaptability, the structural and the salience adaptability in the language used in the statement of defense based on the qualitative research. Through the analysis, the author finds: the contextual elements of adaptation in the statement of defense are reflected on the address forms which demonstrate different social status and roles of the participants in court trial; the structural adaptation in the statement of defense is realized through choosing the proper terms, expressions and sentence types to present the cause and effect in the case to avoid involving their subjective emotions or attitude and provide the judges with a authentic and illustrated description for the final verdict; the salience, i.e., the conscious degree in the statements of defense can be projected at the use of metapragmatic indicators which can demonstrate the defenders'defense opinions towards the case and help defenders construct the statements of defense as a whole coherently and cohesively.This paper as a tentative study provides a panoramic analysis of the statements of defense in Chinese criminal court trial from the perspective of Linguistic Adaptation Theory. The results may broaden the research field of Linguistic Adaptation Theory and offer lawyers some reference to learning and drafting the statements of defense, serving for legal practice by linguistic means.