Control And Counter-control: Power And Discourse Strategies Research In Courtroom Interaction

Courtroom discourse as the new interdisplinary study in the field of linguisticsdraws scholars’ attention, and courtroom interaction research belongs to dynamic studyin courtroom discourse analysis, which is out of the following reasons. On the one hand,from the theoretical perspective, this study belongs to the interdisplinary study betweenlinguistics and sociology, and it uses trail participants as study objects and analyzesmore specific on their relationships among prosecutors、lawyers and defendants; on theother hand, it brings some implications to the participants and members in thecourtroom; besides, it provides some data for the linguistic study and contributes to thecorpus. Basing on the goal principle and it carries out the qualitative study of thetranscription of tape-recordings of two courtroom trials corpus amounting to10,000words. The corpus concerns two criminal cases in Sinkiang Urumchi City IntermediatePeople’s Court. The author uses the object with the purpose of making out the followingquestions:1.Whether the goal principle can explain the relationships among prosecutor、lawyer and defendant?/How about their relations?2. What are discourse strategies theyhave taken in order to achieve their goals?3. During courtroom interaction, what are thegoals and motivations of the questioners and respondents? Combining with thelinguistic data, the paper gets the following findings:1.the goal principle andcooperative principle can explain the relationships among prosecutor、lawyer anddefendant, they are belonging to control and counter-control relations;2.Duringcourtroom interaction, they take questioners’ strategies and respondents’ strategies toachieve their goals;3.Lawyer and defendant belong cooperative relationships, their samegoal are win the case or mitigate defendant’s punishment, but prosecutor is on theopposite side and different goal.There are five parts in this paper, chapter one introduces the purpose, significanceand organization of this thesis, as well as study questions, method and data. Chapter twofocus on literature review abroad and in china, makes a general review of former studies on the study of the courtroom discourse、power and discourse strategies. Based on thesestudies, the author through the relations between power and discourse analyze the traildiscourse from two dimensions: pragmatic analysis and speech strategies. From theaspect of pragmatic analysis, we can use the Principle of Goal. And the speech strategiesanalyze two parts in this thesis: questioners’ strategies and respondents’ strategies.Chapter three, which is the theoretical framework of this thesis, based on the Principleof Goal and discourse strategies, the author builds a conversation analysis modelconcerning goal, cooperative action and discourse strategies and uses it to analyze thepower control and power counter-control. Chapter four, the main parts of the thesis,focused on the two dimensions: pragmatic analysis and discourse strategies to discussthe realization path of the power, and the discourse behavior of the defendants, analyzethe participants who adopt useful discourse strategies to gain power control andcounter-control. Chapter five, which is a conclusion and it summarizes the majorfindings, implications and limitations of the study.The innovation in the thesis:1.Based on the former reading, author summarizesthe types of discourse strategies from two dimensions: questioners’ strategies andrespondents’ strategies, at the same time she discusses different participants how toachieve power and how to counter-power by using different useful discourse strategies;2.We use principle of goal direction to analyze the data, we will find that theparticipants belong to the goal-convergent relations or goal-conflicting relations, but wecannot find goal-neutral relations. So we can find that when principle of goal directionsapplies in criminal trials, it mostly has functions from goal-convergent andgoal-conflicting aspects.