A Study Of Metaphor In Chinese Courtroom Discourse

As a phenomenon omnipresent both in terms of how we talk, and think potentially, metaphor has long been worshiped a magic wand in language in facilitating human communication.The present thesis sets out to examine the metaphors or metaphor-related lexical units used in contemporary Chinese courtroom trial discourse with regard to the forms and functions of these ’trial metaphors’. Theoretically framed within Lakoff & Johnson’s (1980) CMT and Steen et al.’s (2010) MIPVU and data-based on five fully-transcribed Chinese courtroom trials, this study intends to identify and analyze metaphor-related lexical units in this particular type of institutional discourse.It is found that the metaphor-related lexical units used in Chinese courtroom trial discourse can be classified into three categories, i.e. legislative metaphor, procedural metaphor and substantial metaphor, in line with the three types of discourse in courtroom trials context-legislative discourse, procedural discourse and substantial discourse, and that these three categories of metaphor are distinctive in nature as legislative metaphors are to a larger degree related to legal language, procedural metaphors to court trial framing, and substantial metaphors to the case itself being tried.It is suggested that different participants in a court trial tend to use different categories of metaphors, with legislative metaphors being most frequently used by the prosecutor and the lawyers in citing specific legal provisions, the judge using most of procedural metaphors while presiding over the trial, and the litigants and the witnesses resorting to substantial metaphors in narrating their different versions of stories concerning the case. It is also indicated that the underlying legislative metaphors in specific legal provisions reveal to a certain degree some ideologies held by Chinese people regarding the law, and that procedural metaphors are employed by the judge for the purpose of framing the trial in a more ordered fashion into different stages, and that litigants and witnesses rely on substantial metaphors to make themselves better understood in their storytelling. In addition, the substantial metaphor compared with the other two categories boasts the largest number and variety as a result of its largest length of discourse in a court trial, and bears no radical differences from metaphors used in everyday language. The results of the study reflect above all that courtroom trial discourse is another field of discourse in which metaphors permeate.