| Legal language is the most direct form of the incarnation of the legal will and the effective measure to safeguard fairness and justice, which is used strictly in special-purpose communication. Legal language can be broadly divided into the written language of legislation and the spoken and dynamic language of legal process. Courtroom discourse is a kind of interactive and dynamic legal language. Courtroom participants adopt various kinds of linguistic strategies to achieve their communicative motivations and goals. Pragmatic vagueness is a kind of linguistic strategy.Verschueren(1999) claims that using language is a process of continuous making of linguistic choice and this viewpoint is built upon the assumption that language is characterized by variability, negotiability and adaptability. Adaptability has been studied from four angles, namely, contextual correlates of adaptability, structural objects of adaptability, dynamics of adaptability and salience of the adaptation processes. Adaptation Theory is employed in the present study as a guiding principle to study the pragmatic vagueness in courtroom discourse. The thesis will focus on the following research questions: 1) How is vagueness in courtroom discourse adapted to the mental world, the physical world and the social world? 2) How is vagueness reflected at word level, clause and sentence level in courtroom discourse? 3) What are the pragmatic functions of vagueness in courtroom discourse?In order to address the above questions, the author collects some corpus of Chinese courtroom discourse and conducts relevant analyses. By studying and analyzing those materials, the thesis draws several conclusions. First, as to the aspect of adaptability in courtroom discourse, the author mainly analyzes sample vagueness in courtroom discourse from the mental world, the social world and the physical world, and finds out that pragmatic vagueness is used to adapt to the motivations of speakers and hearers, legal obligations, social ethical standards and objective physical world. Second, participants in the courtroom widely use words of generic category, language of naming and evaluation, hedges, vagueness at clauses and sentences level, vagueness sentence patterns and vagueness strategies of ellipsis and replacement to achieve their goals. Third, the research finds six pragmatic functions of vagueness in courtroom discourse as follows: 1) providing appropriate information. Vagueness plays a vital role in expressing the speaker’s degree of certainty and trying to make the utterance more appropriate and reasonable; 2) avoiding absolute utterances. Vagueness can mitigate the negative effects of the utterance, which is beneficial to the harmonious relationship, thus making interactions proceed smoothly; 3) increasing the credibility of utterances. Vagueness can be used to make the utterance more objective; 4) protecting from taking responsibility; 5) enhancing flexibility and self-protection. Vagueness language is a kind of flexible language, which leaves room for further explanations and can be used to protect the speaker; 6) being polite and powerful.This thesis is of both theoretical and practical significance. Theoretically, this thesis can be helpful to extend the studies on Adaptation Theory. And practically, it provides strategic and appropriate ideas on how to create democratic atmosphere in the courtroom trial and how to better use language mechanism to achieve fairness and justice during the process of a trial. |
