Court Speech Events, The Dynamic Analysis

Forensic linguistics is a somewhat new branch of research in the world, which is an interdisciplinary study of both law and language with its significance to the society. More and more scholars become interested in this field since on the basis of theory for linguistics, they can study the legal system from a new perspective.The thesis aims at collecting and transcribing six criminal and civil trials in China, and analysizing the courtroom discourse through the theory of conversational analysis. Firstly it introduces what is legal linguistics and the history and development of it, expounds the information about the current study of legal linguistics both at home and abroad. Then the thesis analysizes the overall organization and local management of the courtroom discourse and points out the features of the structure of courtroom discourse. Furthermore, it examines the turn-taking and adjacency pair and finds that the theory is insufficient in the explanation of all the phenomenon in the courtroom discourse. Lastly the thesis deals with the question-response structure because this structure is in the bigger proportion with the speech events of courtroom participants. Several modes of question-response are illustrated with some examples, and some suggestions and strategies to the interlocutors who ask questions are provided.Therefore, this thesis not only shows the current situation of speech events in Chinese courtroom but also implies some social significance to the legal professionals as well as Chinese judicial system.