Impoliteness In Courtroom Discourse

This thesis is devoted to the impoliteness strategies applied by the defense attorneys towards their clients in court trials.The corpus of this thesis is selected from 112 trials provided by the CCTV-12 legal program Court Trial(from January 6th,2014 to April 26th,2016).According to the theoretical analysis and feedback from Chinese subjects,the researcher tentatively obtains 14 extracts as the data of this research.Firstly,based on Culpeper's(2011)framework and the judgment made by 109 fluent native Chinese speakers,this thesis tentatively defines impoliteness made by the defense lawyers in Chinese courtroom trial as a speech act.Though the judge and other participants in court are involved in the trial communication,the defendants,as the target of the defense lawyers' impoliteness,inevitably play the role of "addressees" in this context.Meanwhile,following Brown&Levinson's(1987)Model Person assumption,this thesis analyzes the motivations for the use of impoliteness.In addition,this thesis relates impoliteness with the sentencing circumstances in jurisdiction,wherein most impoliteness involves the legally prescribed circumstances of sentencing and discretionary circumstances of sentencing,while a few are related to indirect circumstances of sentencing.Secondly,this thesis formalizes four structures in which impoliteness is used in courtroom discourse,which are explanation-based impoliteness,description-based impoliteness,evaluation-based impoliteness,and other impoliteness,and then classifies impoliteness in courtroom into three kinds,namely positive impoliteness,negative impoliteness and off-record impoliteness.Finally,this thesis explores the pragmatic functions of impoliteness,such as expressing anger,gaining sympathy,and reducing a penalty.In order to analyze the practical communicative effects of impoliteness in trials,this thesis analyzes the feedback from judges in interviews.In summary,the use of impoliteness in courtroom by defense attorneys towards their clients helps to defend the defendants' legitimate rights and reduce the penalty by mitigating or aggravating the circumstances of sentencing.This thesis has the following conclusion:as a debating strategy,impoliteness helps the defense to realize their communicative purpose in court.