The Application Of The Observation And Violation Of The Cooperative Principle In Courtroom Discourse

Forensic Linguistics is an interdisciplinary subject of linguistics and law.In recent years,with the emergence and rapid development of the subject of Forensic Linguistics,more and more scholars at home and abroad have applied linguistics to law,in the hope of using various theories of Linguistics to solve the legal problems in our daily life.Courtroom discourse is an important part of the study of Forensic Linguistics.As a kind of institutional discourse,it has aroused the attention and research of many scholars at home and abroad.They have studied and analyzed courtroom discourse from different points of view,and have achieved plentiful and substantial achievements.Since Grice's Cooperative Principle was first put forward in 1967,it has attracted much interest and attention of researchers at home and abroad.On the basis of criticizing and inheriting Grice's Cooperative Principle,they have developed the Cooperative Principle and formed their own theories,such as Levinson's QIM Principle and Leech's Politeness Principle and so on.Some scholars have also applied the Cooperative Principle to the fields of various disciplines and try to use it to analyze and explain some of the phenomena.Under this kind of background,this thesis attempts to use the Cooperative Principle to analyze the discourse of the defendants when they answer the questions of the judge,prosecutor,lawyer and so on in the court trials.This thesis,based on the theoretical framework of the Cooperative Principle and its violation,combines the data that are transcribed from“Court Trial”(“????”)of CCTV-12 to analyze the circumstance and degree of the defendants'compliance with the Cooperative Principle,and make further efforts to discuss the factors that will affect the degree of the defendants'observation of the Cooperative Principle.In the end,aiming at non-cooperation of the defendants,this thesis summarizes several useful and practical questioning strategies for the judge,prosecutor,lawyer and so on,thus making the defendants abide by the Cooperative Principle,answer the questions truthfully and provide the information that the judge,prosecutor and lawyer want.After a detailed analysis,the findings are as follows.First all of,in the process of the court trials,most of the defendants will abide by the Cooperative Principle for most of the time,and only a few people do not observe the Cooperative Principle.However,they are not observing or violating the Cooperative Principle all the time.What's more,the extent to which they abide by the Cooperative Principle is different.According to the degree of observing or violating the Cooperative Principle,some defendants are complete cooperation,and some of the defendants belong to partial cooperation while other defendants can be labeled as non-cooperation.In addition,the most major and important factor that affects the different degrees of the defendants' observation of the Cooperative Principle is that they are afraid that if they confess the facts and the real intentions of their crimes truthfully,they will be punished severely by the law and faced with the sentence of imprisonment.As a result,in order to escape from the sanction of the law,they may choose not to cooperate.In the face of the defendants' noncooperation,the judge,prosecutor and so on are supposed to attach great importance to it and change the way of questioning,compelling them to cooperate and to answer the questions honestly and truthfully as well as to provide true information.The innovation of this thesis is that this thesis divides the degree of the defendants' observation of the Cooperative Principle into three kinds of cooperation.They are complete cooperation,partial cooperation and non-cooperation.Furthermore,a main and important factor that affects the different degrees of the defendants' observation of the Cooperative Principle has been explored in this thesis,which has not yet been done by the previous studies.This thesis also summarizes some useful questioning strategies to cope with non-cooperation of the defendants,which is of very important theoretical and practical significance and which is able to provide guidance and reference for the legal workers,such as judges,lawyers and prosecutors,in the future judicial practice.