The Defendants' Use Of Hedges In Courtroom Arguments

Fuzziness is the intrinsic property of human language and the use of hedges can be seen in different fields,including juridical field.Previous studies all show that hedges,as a kind of communicative strategies,are widely used by judges,lawyers or witnesses in courtroom arguments.Few studies,however,focus on the defendants',the least powerful participant in the courtroom arguments,use of hedges as a pragmatic strategy to show politeness to the judges and prosecutors or self-protect themselves or make their utterance closer to the fact,thus making the details of the case clearer or helping them bear less legal liability.The data of this thesis comes from 16 court cases transcribed by the author from the Chinese Court Net and Court Scene,including 8 civil cases and 8 criminal cases.Based on Prince's and He Ziran's classification of hedges,this thesis probes into types of hedges adopted by defendants during the process of courtroom argument and defendants' violation of the maxims of the Cooperative Principle and the implicature arising from the violation of the maxims of the Cooperative Principle,as well as ways to achieve three pragmatic functions of hedges.Through a careful and comprehensive study of the collected data,the author finds that there are approximators and shields in defendants' courtroom arguments,between them,approximators,including adaptors and rounders,account for 44.7%,while shields which include plausibility shields and attribution shields,account for 55.3%.The approximators are the most frequently used hedges in criminal cases,while shields are more likely adopted by defendants in civil cases.Approximators can change the truth value of the utterance,making the information more accurate.While shields can make the utterance more polite and persuasive.The defendants violate the maxims of the Cooperative Principle by using hedges in courtroom arguments,which can widen the imagination space of the language and guide the hearers deduce implicatures of their utterance,thus helping them bear less legal liability.The study also shows that defendants' use of hedges in the courtroom arguments has three pragmatic functions: accurate function,self-protection function and polite function.This three functions are achieved by various way by defendants' use of hedges in courtroom arguments.This study aims to provide a new perspective of the study of defendants' arguments and cause extensively concern of defendants,the least power participant in courtroom,thus enriching the research of the participants' arguments in courtroom at home.