A Study Of Echo Questions In Chinese Courtroom Discourse From The Perspective Of Emotional Pragmatic Representation

From 1960s to 1990s and until now the study on forensic linguistics abroad has gotten prosperous achievements with its focus changing from language as object to language as process and finally, language as instrument. While in China, the distance is quite obvious. Echo question, as a crucial area in forensic linguistics, plays a significant role during the whole trial procedure. Some scholars at home and abroad have made academic progresses on this topic in daily life; however, few are about that in courtroom discourse. Being a kind of special and complex psychological activities, emotion attributes abundant effects in human being's daily life, so as in Chinese courtroom procedure, in which the participants could fulfill their pragmatic objectives by way of emotion in echo questions.With the purpose of providing an in-depth analysis of echo questions in contemporary Chinese courtroom discourse as well as how speakers express their emotions and pragmatic functions, this thesis chooses randomly 20 cases from CCTV12, the column THE SCENE OF TRIAL, and transmits them into word documents, and then studies the echo questions in contemporary Chinese courtroom discourse, involving the definition, classification, discourse features and pragmatic functions under the guideline of the pragmatic theories like relevance, conversational implicature, principle of aim and cooperation, putting the emphasis on the classification of emotion in echo questions and how speakers express their emotions and pragmatic purposes through rhetoric devices, interaction patterns as well as intonation, which will be finished with the speech analysis software Praat. As to the rhetoric devices, we will use Aristotle's three approaches of persuasion:ethos, logos and pathos to analyze. While Liao Meizhen's classification of interaction patterns in courtroom discourse would be consulted, mainly focusing on the "Qi-Ri" "I-R-F" and "Q-R-Fi+r-Fii". What's more, the pitch, intensity and length of the intonation will be studied. Finally, we would like to get these conclusions that emotion in echo questions in contemporary Chinese courtroom discourse could be classified into two categories:one is the emotion that is expressed sufficiently and apparently which can be classified into indignation, doubt, surprise, sympathy and disappointment; the other one is the emotion that is expressed not so apparently or even no emotion is adopted. Different emotions are playing different significance in expressing different pragmatic functions. Besides, ethos and logos are the basis for the emotional expression of pathos; while the third interaction pattern(Q-R-Fi+r-Fii) is the most sufficient one in the expression of emotion and pragmatic functions. And the pitch, intensity and length of echo questions are much stronger than those of the previous utterances, indicating that echo question is a significant tool for speakers to express their emotions as well as pragmatic purposes in Chinese courtroom discourse.As so significant a language phenomenon in courtroom discourse, echo question deserves more attention. Through the systematic thoroughly study on how speakers express their emotions as well as pragmatic purposes, this study hopes to afford referable suggestions for law workers and trial participants, and with the sincere wish to solve disputes by appropriate language skills so as to promote the working efficiency of the whole trial procedure and save judicial resources.