An Adaptation-based Study On Evasive Answering Strategies In Arbitration Court

Arbitration,a form of alternative dispute resolution(ADR),is a legal process that parties voluntarily delegate the disputes to an impartial third party or panel for a fair decision outside the court systems.As an efficient mode of settling commercial disputes,arbitration is known for its confidentiality,flexibility and economy,which makes it play an increasingly important role in the modern legal society.In the arbitration court,parties generally employ plenty of discourse strategies to protect their interests and shirk responsibilities.Especially when parties realize that direct answering would result in unfavorable consequences,they conduct evasive answering strategies to hide their negative information and minimize loss.Therefore,arbitrator should timely restrain parties' implementation of evasive answering strategies so as to improve the efficiency of trial and achieve the goal of mediation.However,few research has concentrated on the arbitration discourse for the late development of arbitration and its confidentiality.Thus,with the support of Chongqing Arbitration Committee,this empirical research is conducted to explore the parties' implementation of different evasive answering strategies based on Verschueren's Adaptation Theory,and tries to answer the following questions:(1)What are the features of evasive answering strategies applied by parties in different arbitration processes?(2)What types of evasive answering strategies are implemented by parties in responding to the arbitrator?(3)What are the internal mechanisms for parties to choose different evasive answering strategies in arbitration?The author collected 15 recordings of arbitration cases,transcribed the data and constructed a spoken corpus with 234,475 Chinese characters.Then,according to different stages of arbitration,each arbitration case was divided into six moves.Meanwhile,this study applies both quantitative,qualitative and corpus-based methods to build annotating framework of evasive answering strategies,calculate their frequencies and ratios,and discuss their applied features so as to illustrate the deep reasons of choosing them.From the data and discussion,it is found that:(1)The implementation of evasive answering strategies demonstrate both dynamicand strongly context-dependent characteristics.Parties' imbalanced usage of evasive answering strategies lies in the manifold communicative purposes they intend to achieve.Parties seldom adopt evasive answering strategies in the beginning and ending,for these two stages do not involve parties' vital interests.And they are eager to show their willingness of active coordination and make a good impression on arbitrators as well.When the arbitration comes into a critical phase,such as the Confrontation,parties would choose different sorts of evasive answering strategies to maximize their own interests,which is dynamically adapted to different contexts.(2)Parties tend to adopt covert evasive answering strategies without any discourse markers,and cautiously use overt evasive answering strategies in the whole process of arbitration.In the attempt to achieve different communicative goals,parties frequently choose multiple evasive answering strategies in the process of Confrontation.Changing the Topic Focus of the Question and Providing Ambiguous Answer are representative types of strategies that parties use to conceal passive information and shirk responsibilities.(3)Under the parties' salience of adaptation processes,evasive answering strategies are their conscious linguistic choices,which dynamically adapt to their mental world and the arbitration context.Adapting to the arbitration rules,their weak discourse power in arbitration and their mental motivation of earning supports from arbitrators,parties consciously choose evasive answering strategies to respond in a sensitive scenario.These results indicate that the diverse evasive answering strategies conducted by parties reflect dynamic and strong context-dependent characteristics.Therefore,arbitrator shall recognize different types of evasive answering strategies that parties implemented in arbitration and revise his/her method of interrogation timely according to these strategies so as to relieve the burden of understanding with each other.By restraining parties' usage of evasive answering strategies,arbitrator could not only better extract crucial information,but also accelerate the progress of arbitration and resolve the disputes impartially.