A Study On Power In Arbitration Discourse Based On Conversational Structure Analysis

Nowadays arbitration has been widely received as a non- litigational alternative resolution in both civil and commercial disputes. Nevertheless, in academic circle, studies on arbitration mainly concentrate on legal realm. The linguistics circle has insufficient interdisciplinary researches upon arbitration. Based on Conversation Analysis, this study intends to empirically disclose power in arbitration tribunal discourse with the help of corpus. Theoretically speaking, this study can enrich empirical researches in legal circle, push forward the institutional dynamic language studies, and broaden the application of Conversation Analysis in institutional language. This research adopts CA to analyze power, and facilitates the application of CA in disclosing social ideology. Practically speaking, this study can inspire the related arbitration working staff to pay attention to arbitration proceedings from a new anglelanguage, to provide new development approach and maintain social harmony.Conversation Analysis is a beneficial and useful analyzing tool for talk-ininteraction. The study aims to disclose arbitrators? power through arbitration discourse analysis. To be specifically, the researching questions include:①What are the features of arbitration tribunal conversation in both overall and segmented phases?②How does the arbitrators? language unfold their institutional power in terms of the overall conversation structures?③What are the features of the micro-leveled conversation structures?④How does the arbitrators? language give expression to arbitrators? institutional power in terms of detailed conversation structures?The study selected 15 cases of transcribed arbitration tribunal conversation with a total Chinese characters of 247, 498 for use. UAM Corpus tool was adopted for corpus building, and its custom framework function was applied to build the analyzing structure. The whole corpus was annotated manually. Based on CA, this study applied combinatively both quantitative and quantitative researching methods to analyze arbitrators? power manifestation in conversation structures from both overall and specific aspects. In the macro level, the study analyzed the openings, closings, and bodies. In the micro level, this study focused on features of turn formations, adjacency pairs, and turn taking. With regard to statistics, the automatic calculating function was applied.After the analysis of overall and specific conversational structures, the study obtains the following results: 1) In terms of macro conversation structures, arbitration discourse complies with strict discipline, and the overall conversation structures are fixed. Arbitrators initiated the whole process, and the opening is formulaic. The closings have boundary sequence, pre-closing sequence, closing sequence, which are amazingly the same in different cases. During the process, large numbers of questions are used to drive the process. 2) In the macro-level, arbitrators? power mainly manifests in aspects of their professional knowledge and their tight control of the arbitration process. Arbitrators have more knowledge power in terms of the using of fixed openings, procedural discourse, and formulaic closings. Arbitrators exert the power to declare the opening and skillfully seek answers from all parties involved. All these manifest arbitrators? institutional superior power. 3) With regard to the specific conversation structures, arbitrators? turn formation changes variously. Arbitrators occupy large percentage of turns. In addition, massive question-answer adjacency pairs are used, in which many questions with different controlling ability are applied. In the aspect of turn taking, arbitrators choose the next speaker by turn nomination, and claim the turn by interruption and repetition, etc. 4) In the micro level, arbitrators? power mainly manifests in their superior language freedom and powerful strategies adoption. Arbitrators flexibly use long or short turns, take more chances to speak, and enjoy more power. Apart from their superior power, questions with different controlling ability are used to limit both parties? and their agents? language freedom. The powerful strategies of interruption and repetition also manifest their power.