A Discourse Analysis Of Conflict Talk In Courtroom From The Perspective Of Impoliteness

Conflict talk is a universally common phenomenon in the daily life and also the language behavior that the participants employ some language strategies to express their impoliteness, such as insult, challenging, quarreling and the like. Conflict talk always appears with the impoliteness. Culpeper (1998) argues that impoliteness is a strategy that affects the hearer’s face and destroys the interpersonal relationship. It is performed consciously and intentionally. As for conflict talk, domestic and foreign scholars have conducted many researches from many perspectives, with ethnomethodology, sociology and pragmatics as the mainstream.Following the pragmatic perspective, this thesis analyzes the conflict talk on the basis of the data from Bo Xilai’s Case and the other three cases in CCTV12legal program《庭审现场》. According to the mode for oral discourse analysis that Psathas (1995) puts forward, first, the author downloads the video; second, the oral dialogues are transferred to the written form; third, the data is analyzed; forth, the author reports the findings.Courtroom discourse is a typically institutional discourse with fixed procedures, which differentiate it from the other discourse types. Taking Culpeper’s Impoliteness Principle and Response Mode as the theoretical framework, this author notices that most of the impolite forms that Culpeper proposes can find their realization in the data, like insults, challenging, criticism, complaints and blocking, while other language forms seldom appear, such as threatening. Besides, another new form, negation, is found to frequently appear in the courtroom discourse, when the defendants don’t want to tell the detailed truth. Then, the analysis of the data reveals that offensive-offensive pairings are overwhelming in the family civil cases while in some economic civil cases the defendant usually adopts the offensive-defensive pairing to counter the FT As; yet, in the criminal cases where the defendants are the major criminal suspects, the defendants seldom counter the impolite interrogation but accept it. Finally, the author analyzes the institutional function of courtroom discourse, which mainly embodies in the imbalance of power and the social support to the powerful party. At the same time, the author sums up the pragmatic features of courtroom conflict talk, that is, the priority to initiate the impoliteness by the powerful party, bi-direction, directness and intentionality.Since few scholars have paid attention to the courtroom conflict talk, the readers can find a new perspective from the present study to understand the conflict in courtroom. It may promote a better understanding of the law language and may make some contributions to the construction of Chinese harmonious society.