A Study On Courtroom Cross-examination From Perspective Of The Principle Of Goal

Based on the analysis on the cross-examination of a few famous cases(such as the O.J.Simpson Trial and the Leonard Peltier Trial),this thesis aims to expose the dominant role of the Principle of Goal in the speech strategies in courtroom cross-examination.Conversation is the main pattern of trials and the primary carrier of the institutionality,where antagonism is the basic property of the courtroom interactions.While during the dynamic proceeding of trials,cross-examination that collects all such conflicts is doomed to become the concern of this thesis.Based on adjacency pairs in conversation analysis,the study works on the speech conflicts between the two parties with opposite goals.Among the participants of a trial,the judge is a neutral party who produces speech acts to regulate the trial procedure and find the truth,while the conflict between the prosecution and the defense is inevitable on the ground of their opposite goals and interests at trial.It is because of such difference in goals that different utterance properties will be represented at each stage of the trial,and correspondingly distinct speech strategies will be adopted in the procedure as well.In the meanwhile,the speech conflict is also embodied in the control power and related competence between trial professionals and non-professionals.With the goals as the starting points and terminals of all speech acts,the study concentrates on the institutional power,the duty of the lawyer and the other party's witness,and the interaction mode in the question-answer adjacency pairs.In the trial procedure,the power relationship between the participants is mainly embodied in the speech strategies,especially the lawyer's,such as interruption,repetition and presupposition,among which interruption is considered to be the indicator of the institutional power allocation.Starting from the study of adjacency pairs,the thesis analyzes the prominent duality of the trial stories,i.e.,both sides of the trial plan and design stories with different themes according to their respective goal and interest.Of course,such storytelling is not monologic,but constructed dynamically by the questioning and answering between lawyer and witness.What's more special,the storyteller is not the witness who is related to the crime directly or indirectly,but the lawyer who takes the advantage of the institutional power to elicit a favorable story,and in some sense,story-telling is the consequence of “mutual efforts”.On the other hand,the recipient of the story is not the speech producer,but jury,a silent group who holds the right to make the final decision.In essence,the trial is a process where the prosecution and defense produce a story respectively to convince the jurors so as to attain their own interest.Such analyses enable us to further understand the necessity of the study of the speech conflicts at trial,and emphasize the inevitability of the wording strategies under the orientation of the different goals of both parties in such an adversarial institution,especially in cross-examination.And finally,the thesis indicates the limitation of this study,and offers some suggestions for future researches.