The Research On Presupposition, Interruption And Equal Rights In Courtroom Discourse

As we all know, court trial is of great importance in jurisdiction. So it is with courtroom discourse to court trial. As the legal professionals, the judge, the prosecutor and the lawyer in court trial usually employ language strategies, which are vital materials and clues for the research on judicial justice and equality. Owing to the factors, like social status, the education background and the institutional discourse, the judge, the prosecutor and the lawyer always have more discourse power than the defendant and the witness. Discourse strategy might be a typical example. The paper analyzes dislocation causes of the presupposed information and information focus from the micro level and exposes at the same time the fundamental reasons of the discourse power and interruption from the macro level through angles of discourse strategy, discourse turn and topic control and so on.The paper consists of six parts. The first chapter briefly introduces the current research of forensic linguistics and then points out the research focus in China. Afterwards, data collection approaches and research methods as well as expected objects are introduced too. The following chapter is literature review, mainly presenting the research on courtroom discourse and discourse power abroad and in China. The third chapter is the framework. The author introduces the presupposition and interruption theory from respects of the conception, clarifications, reasons, and the research scope. Chapter Four analyses speech manners and features of courtroom participants, including the judge, the prosecutor/ lawyer, the defendant and the witness and lays a basis for the following analysis of reasons, consequences and application of presupposition and interruption strategies. The next section is Chapter Five, which is regarded as the"heart"of the thesis. The author analyses in depth features of the semantic and pragmatic presupposition, the places, reasons and consequences of interruption, which offer both ideas and methods to the defendant and the witness of how to break the presupposition and interruption. Finally, the summary, the significance, the imperfection as well as the suggestion for further study has been drawn.