A Study On The Interruption Of Defendants In Chinese Courtroom Discourses

Forensic linguistics has gained great achievement in China. It is a scientific subject with bright future. As an integrated part of forensic linguistics, courtroom discourse has attracted attention from more and more linguistic scholars, and the research on it is increasing. Courtroom discourse is a typical institutional discourse with unique characteristics and functions. Power is an important and complicated social phenomenon, which has received great focus from the subjects, such as politics, sociology and linguistics. Power is like a net, which dispersed throughout the whole society. In courtroom discourse, discourse is power. During the rigid procedures of courtroom trials, defendants strive for the power to speak for themselves through discourse, with the aim to receive a favorable result. Therefore, courtroom discourse is an ideal circumstance where power and power relation can be seen through.The present thesis, through the quantitative and qualitative analysis to the recording transcripts of five criminal cases and five civil cases according to the researching method, aims to reveal the relationship between interruptions and power in Chinese courtroom trials. Specifically, the thesis makes exploration on the following three questions:(1) What status the defendants obtain through interruptions in courtroom trials? (2) Could any fierce competition over discourse power between defendants and the other participants be observed through interruptions? (3) On the active interruption of defendants, are there any differences between criminal and civil cases?The thesis refers to previous research on the phenomenon of interruption. The research on interruptions in natural conversations is placed before studies on interruptions in institutional discourse, and the focus comes to the interruptions in courtroom discourse. The author finds that the previous studies on the power of courtroom discourse focus on the participants, such as judges, prosecutors and lawyers, but rarely on the research of defendants’ power. In the meantime, the results on related foreign courtroom trials might be inappropriate to China, might not demonstrate the characteristics of Chinese courtroom trials. Thus the present thesis is specially on the interruptions in defendants’discourse in Chinese courtroom trials.The thesis, based on the theory of critical discourse analysis, with conversation analysis the analyzing method, analyzes and demonstrates the power in macrodiscourse through microdiscourse. The research is studied from three aspects, that is, the ratio between interruption number and discourse turns, causes of interruption and places of interruption. The characteristics of defendants’ power in Chinese courtroom trials is reflected through the comparison between defendants and judges, prosecutors and lawyers from the three aspects respectively. The statistics show that defendants have less interruptions and lower percentage in the ratio between interruption number and discourse turns than judges and prosecutors; in terms of causes of interruption, defendants’ primary cause is cooperation in criminal cases, while in civil cases, such cause is not so significant, with insisting on floor as the primary cause; and in terms of places of interruption, defendants have much lower percentage than judges and prosecutors in the beginning of a turn.The results show that in courtroom trials, defendants obtain much less power than judges and prosecutors; defendants are controlled by judges and prosecutors, especially in criminal courtroom trials, defendants controlled by prosecutors more seriously; defendants and prosecutors compete over the discourse power in the fiercest way; and compared with criminal cases, defendants in civil cases gain relatively more discourse power.Finally, the author points out the meaning, limitations and future research suggestions of the thesis. As an experiment and improvement to the research on the power in Chinese courtroom trials, the research is of certain importance to theory and practice. On one hand, the thesis reflects the real outlook of Chinese courtroom trials in a certain degree and puts forward the method of combining microdiscourse with macrodiscourse to study institutional discourse. And the research proves the necessity of carrying out legal language studies. On the other hand, for legal practioners, the research has practical implications to the improvement of their working capabilities in courtroom trials, promoting fairness and justice, and thus to improve the efficiency of judicial trials. One of the limitations of the research is that the data is not the latest, might not reflect the real outlook of Chinese courtroom trials in the best way. And the research does not take the defendants’ educational level and their application of some strategies into account as well. In the future research, the author will try to collect the latest real courtroom data, consider the defendants’ overall situation and specialize in the research of defendants’ power in a more comprehensive way.