Criminal Trial Discourse Analysis

Language, among mankind's communication tools and information transmitters, is the most important one. Being used in different areas, it forms different language styles. Forensic linguistics, as a branch of linguistic studies, has its own characteristics and includes legislative language, judicial language and executive language. As discourse of criminal court trial is the target of the study, it is the judicial language that the paper studies. As one of the important legal activities, court trial, especially criminal court trial, is closely related with people's lives and property. Because of the huge influence the discourse of criminal court trial has on the party concerned, studying it is of profound theoretical and practical significance.Relevance theory by Sperber and Wilson are used as the theoretical basis of the paper to study the discourse of criminal court trial .Firstly, the author introduces such relevant basic concepts as discourse, discourse analysis and discourse analysis of criminal court trial etc, and the process of criminal court trial as well. Secondly, the author analyzes turn and adjacency pair of the discourse of criminal court trial and carries out a quantitative analysis of the ratio of adjacency pair. Based on the analysis, the finding are that the disparity of power among the participants in the court is in fact the result of their different positions in the power hierarchy, the participants enjoy different levels of discourse .The judge has the most powerful discourse power, because he not only presides the whole process of the court trial but also decides the result of the case, and then public prosecutor and lawyer, the defendant has the least power. Thirdly, the author analyzes the relevance of the discourse based on the relevance theory. Relevance theory acknowledges the size of language context and believes that language context is not static but dynamic. One discourse, which is not relevant in a smaller context, can be found having relevance in a larger context. Debate on the size of a context often plays a strategic role in fact-finding stage of a case. Furthermore, on the basis of a corpus of criminal court trial discourse, the author also finds that reasoning in criminal court trial sometimes does not strictly follow logical forms, but takes an approach of relevance reasoning of cognitive context, which is demonstrated through specific cases in the paper. And finally, the author analyzes discourse conflict phenomena----- interruption and repetition, and summarizes the speech strategies used by participants in criminal court trial and the participants'speech characteristics. In short, the study is useful to legal workers.