Study On The Hedges Used In The Defendants’ Arguments In Civil Court From The Perspective Of Adaptation Theory

Hedges,as one of the effective pragmatic strategies,play an important role in daily interaction.Recent years have seen a great volume of studies upon hedges in copious registers and from various perspectives,and the research upon hedges never ceases to stimulate the academic’s interest.However,the adaptability-theoretic studies of hedges upon courtroom discourse are infrequent,where the attention to the defendants’ discourse is still insufficient and there is a common lack of analysis of the judges’ response strategies to the hedges used by the defendants.Therefore,theoretically grounded in Adaptation Theory and guided by Prince et al.’s classification principles,the thesis explores the defendants’ hedge using features,their motivations for using hedges,and the judges’ response strategies to the defendants’ use of hedges in civil court by quantitative and qualitative analyses.In the present study,a Civil Courtroom Discourse Corpus(abbreviated as CCDC)has been firstly built by utilizing the transcripts of twenty civil cases selected from Court Scene in CCTV-12,covering property disputes,marriage and family disputes,succession disputes and tort disputes,based upon which a Defendants’ Arguments subCorpus(abbreviated as DAC)has been created.Then,all the hedges used in the defendants’ arguments have been identified and labeled as adaptors,rounders,plausibility shields,and attribution shields on the basis of the definition given by Verschueren and the classification of Prince et al.,and the distribution of them is described.Next,the defendants’ motivations for using hedges have been explored from the perspective of Verschueren’s Adaptation Theory,and the communicative effects the use of hedges has brought are illustrated.Eventually,the judges’ response strategies to the defendants’ use of hedges in civil court have been summarized based on the corpora.Quantitative results show that there is wide use of hedges in defendants’ arguments in civil court,where the number of hedges accounts for 7.25% in all the words of DAC.Among all hedges,approximators are more frequently used by the defendants compared with shields.Moreover,adaptors account for the highest proportion while attribution shields account for the lowest one.Such a result is related to the special language style of the civil court and the special status of the defendants in courtroom trials to certain degree.Qualitative analyses suggest that the defendants’ motivations for using hedges are owning to their adaptation to contextual correlates or to structural objects,the process of which is dynamic and salient.During the adaptation process,the defendants tend to use various kinds of hedges to adapt to contextual correlates,which generates different communicative effects like showing respect or politeness,facilitating communication,avoiding responsibility,etc.However,when the defendants’ use of hedges exerts some negative influence upon the semantic meaning of their utterances,or rather,does not achieve the adaptation to the judges’ mental world,the judges will resort to some response strategies including narrowing down,repeating,showing doubt and presupposing to obtain accurate information and proceed the process of courtroom trials.Through a comprehensive analysis of the hedges used in the defendants’ arguments in civil court,the thesis aims to enrich the research perspective upon the hedges used in courtroom discourse,to arouse the public’s attention to the defendants’ discourse,to offer the defendants some suggestions on the use of hedges,and to provide some linguistic implications for other courtroom participants like judges and lawyers upon how to respond to hedges.