A Study On Information Output In Criminal Trial Conversation-An Intonation Approach

Conversation discourse consists of ordinary conversation and institutional talk. Court trial conversation is a typical form of institutional talk. Based on the nature of legal cases, court trial conversation can be subdivided into three categories, namely, civil trial conversation, criminal trial conversation and administrative conversation. The objects of adjudication in criminal trial are criminals, which has made criminal trial conversation the most solemn and institutional conversation form.The essential difference between written discourse and conversational discourse is that the former is silent texts, the latter is verbal utterances. Conversation analysis concerns with both "what to say" and "how to say". Entirely different conversational implicature will be conveyed when the same text content is delivered in different intonation patterns. "What to say" refers to information output, including information structure and information content. The basic unit in information structure is information unit (IU), which is comprised of given information and new information, the former is an optional part, the latter is a compulsory part. In conversation analysis, the terminology of information content is conversational implicature. "How to say" denotes intonation pattern. To conduct further analysis on intonation features, intonation has been classified by Halliday into three interdependent systems, which are respectively tonality, tonicity and tone. Tonality segments an utterance into a number of intonation groups (IGs), each of which is structured into pre-head, head, nucleus and tail. Nucleus is the necessary part, the other three are optional. When IGs coincide with IUs, it is unmarked tonality. When inconformity of demarcation between IGs and IUs is observed, it is marked tonality. Through intonation parameters like pitch, intensity, length etc., tonicity serves primarily to identify the locality of the nucleus in an IG. In unmarked tonality, nucleus often carries new information. Tone is the pitch movement pattern, and reflects identities of interlocutors.According to Halliday's systematic functional grammar, there are three meta-functions of languages, namely, ideational, interpersonal and textual. Ideational meta-function is the content conveyed by languages. Through mood and modality, interpersonal meta-function serves to achieve interpersonal meaning. Textual meta-function integrates the previous two by virtue of cohesion, which refers to cohesion both within and out of sentences. Altogether fifteen criminal trial videos broadcasted from 2010 to 2011 have been collected from Court Trial on CCTV-12. Based on a theoretical framework established by the Hallidayan 3T theory, information structure and meta-functions of languages, the intonation pattern and information structure of criminal trial conversations have been probed into by means of a speech analyzing software Praat. This study aims to come up with an innovative intonational model of conversation analysis. An in-depth exploration on characteristics of intonation pattern and information output of judges and defendants in criminal trials will be investigated in accordance with the newly established analysis model.