Judicial Injustice: A CDA Study On Courtroom Discourses Generated By The Prosecutor And The Defendant

Wu Ying,a famous young woman who used to be the so-called billionaire,once created an astonishing career depending on her keen and unique business insights.From being a legend to being a prisoner,her experiences has triggered continuous controversies and discussion.The existence of the Case of People against Wu Ying(thereafter referred to as the WY Case)shows us not only the issue of her inappropriate behaviors,but also the problem of judicial injustice.By linguistic deconstruction,this study is able to break down the discourse,pointing out the inappropriate expressions while prosecutor as well as defendant performing their rights of speech on court,revealing those social factors obstructing judicial justice,offering a rather new angle of linguistics for the study on this case.In order to revere how prosecutor and defendant fulfill their purpose on court,and how do they fail to rightfully present their arguments,this study starts with linguistic analysis,describing the linguistic features presenting in the discourse transcript.Then,by presenting the pragmatic strategies employed by both parties,the author reveals the conflict between them.Finally,context is taken into account as the social factors.Employing Fairclough's three-dimension theory,Critical Discourse Analysis is conducted to reveal the attitudes,pragmatic strategies and ideology behind it.Data required in this study is transcribed from the video of the WY Case.According to this study,it is found that: 1)the prosecutor used a series of negative appraisal resources to express the negative affections,while the defendant tried to prove the legitimacy of her behavior by using positive appraisal resources;2)the defendant tried to give ambiguous response in order to avoid unfavorable information under the guidance of the prosecutor;3)contexts of the discourses generated by two parties fall into 3 categories: institutional context,situational context,and social context.As a study from linguistic perspective,it is hoped that findings in this study provide some possible points of departure for analyzing courtroom discourses generated from criminal trials involving financial crimes,enriching the applications of CDA study on legal practice.