A Research Of Conflict Discourse In Courtroom From The Perspective Of Impoliteness Principle

Conflict discourse is a general linguistic phenomenon.As one of the subjects that pragmatics is concerned with,it contains a series of speech acts or events like argument,squabble,disapproval,refutation and so on.Usually,conflict discourse is connected with impoliteness.According to Culpeper(1998),impoliteness,employed by the addresser intentionally,is a communicative strategy which can lead to the conflict in the social communication,thus influencing the addressee's face.The communicative effect of impoliteness is negative.In recent years,the subject conflict discourse has attracted the attention of many linguists,but the researches on it have rarely been made from the perspective of impoliteness.This thesis will explore the theory of impoliteness of Culpeper as a framework to analyze the data from the TV legal program of CCTV 12,TINGSHEN.COURT.GOV.CN and the author's on-spot record with the quantitative and qualitative analysis method.There are 11 cases and 363 series of corpus in total.Adopting the general model for the analysis of the oral discourse,this thesis cuts video,transcribes the oral language into written language,makes a analysis and reports the findings.The findings show that the positive impoliteness strategy is employed most frequently,while the sarcasm or mock politeness is seldom used in courtroom conflict discourse,because of the feature of basing on the truth of trial.In addition,the author combines the impoliteness strategies of Culpeper and Bousfield to analyze several pragmatic strategies like challenge,interruption,avoidance and repudiation.Moreover,the analysis of the response patterns of courtroom conflict discourse shows that the offensive-offensive paring often occurs in civil cases while the offensive-defensive is often used in criminal cases.And the strategy of not responding is often used by the public prosecutor,in terms of their professional ethics,higher education etc.Finally,the author summarizes the six features of the conflict discourse in courtroom: with an unbalanced power,seriousness,directness,intentionality,bidirection and gender difference.Besides,there are four functions in the aspect of negativeness and positiveness identified by the author to make harmonious process and just result of the trial by avoiding the negative function.