A Game-theoretical Study Of Court-related Mediation Discourse In Chinese

As an indispensible part of Civil Judicial Procedure, Court-related Mediation goes through the whole civil procedures and plays an important role in dispute resolution and social harmony construction under the Pattern of Large Mediation or Large Appeal Petition.. Court-related mediation process is a process of mediation discourse use. Mediation discourse goes through the whole mediation process, involving the dispute resolution from the beginning to the end, thus consisting of the whole mediation activities. As an institutional discourse, Court-related Mediation Discourse (CMD in short) is operated by means of mediators’mediating discourse expression, response and their interaction, so as to carry out negotiation and realize common recognition, sharing its particular discourse mechanism and mediating strategies. Opposed to the Court-related Judicial Discourse (CJD in short), literatures on CMD are relatively rare, without arousing academic scholars’enough attention. And the research perspectives are monotonous. CMD mechanism and mediating strategies have not been fully and thoroughly described and interpreted, which greatly confines CMD’s functions and roles towards dispute resolution and harmony construction under the characteristic China Judicial System, that is, the procedure of which combines the judicial and mediating processes into one whole procedure.Based on our first-hand authentic CMD data, this dissertation focuses on CMD mechanism and mediation strategies as the research subject, constructing theoretical framework of CMD goal game after different linguistic view of language game, language accommodation and language goal being integrated into Discourse Goal Game Model (DGGM in short) via tracing back different schools of linguistic theories. This dissertation makes a qualitative description, interpretation as well as normalization construction with the combination of the characteristics of court-related mediation activities. This dissertation focuses on CMD game mechanism, constructs CMD’s mediation space, describes typical game models revealed through the court-related mediation activities qualititatively in a macro sense, makes analysis and interpretation of the whole procedures of the CMD expression, response and their interaction, in the hope of revealing CMD mechanism and actual mediation discourse strategies within the court-related mediation activities, shedding light on the advocacy of dispute resolution via the Pattern of Large Mediation, and construction of social harmony from the Game Approach to CMD by way of description and interpretation of CMD, deepening the understanding of CMD mechanism in order to further serve the court-related mediation activities and achieve the desired judicial and social effects of court-related mediation activities under the Pattern of Large Mediation. The main contents of this dissertation briefly summarizes as follows:Chapter One first of all, makes a brief introduction to related aspects of mediation and this research, which is further divided into two sections. Section One makes a brief survey of mediation, mediation system, its implications, nature, value, constructions as well as functions of CMD, outlining the macro-and micro-structures, characteristics and classification of court-related mediating acts and communicative contextual features and its implications for this CMD study as a kind of judicial activity; Section Two focuses on the relevant aspects of this research, including a brief survey of this research, its data, research questions, objectives, contents, key questions, difficulties and focuses, methodology, characteristics, contributions and significance as well.Chapter Two focuses on literature review of CMD at home and abroad, tracing back to its contributions and shortcomings of CMD researches from the two dimensions, that is, legal-oriented and linguistic-oriented. With brief comments on the researches of CMD, this chapter presents the questions about CMD to be solved.Chapter Three, on the basis of literature review and its characteristics of court-related mediation discourse, focuses on constructing the theoretical framework of this research, that is, Discourse Goal Game Model of CMD. First of all, this chapter gives a brief introduction to Game Theory, its definition, origin, and premise hypothesis, elements and classification as well. And then, this chapter traces back the relevant linguistic views of CMD communication, focusing on Views of Language Game such as Language Game Theory, Communicative Game Theory and Pragmatic Game Theory; View of Language Accommodation such as Linguistic Accommodation Theory, Linguistic Adaptation Theory and Linguistic Regulatory Theory; and View of Language Goal such as Discourse Goal Analysis and Goal-driven Communicative Models under the Goal-oriented Principle. After the integration of these relevant Views of Language and linguistic theories, this study constructs its own theoretical framework, that is, Discourse Goal Game Model of CMD and expounds it in details from three aspects, game motivation of CMDe, discourse goal of CMD and Discourse Goal Game Model of CMD. In combination with characteristics of CMD, Discourse Goal Game Model of CMD classifies into three aspects of a discourse goal game:Discourse Goal Game of expression, response and their interaction, which provides its theoretical instruction and analyzing approach for the description and interpretation of CMD from the perspective of Discourse Goal Game.Chapter Four focuses on the construction of Mediation Discourse Spaces. As known to all, the game premise of CMD lies in its mediation space, otherwise court-related mediation does not go smoothly and mediation discourse space will be suspended. Based on this premise hypothesis and their restrictive factors of discourse activities, that is, situation-physical, cognition-psychological and social-cultural factors, this dissertation constructs the Mediation Discourse Game Space Models, including the physical, psychological and social discourse spaces. This chapter also analyzes the discourse space model of CMD and verifies its applications with CMD data along with the four stages of court-related mediation procedure, that is, the dispute lead-in,dispute-narration, dispute-negotiation and dispute-resolution stages.Chapter Five explores the game ideas within the court-related mediation activity. This chapter divides into two sections. Section One focuses on the introduction to the three classic Game Models, that is, Prisoners’Dilemma Game Model, Clever Pig’s Game Model, Hen-struggling Game Model and the two derived Game Models from Prisoners’Dilemma Model, that is, the Lovers’Game Model and Stag Hunt Dilemma Game Model. Section Two makes a description and analysis on CMD game together with CMD data as illustrating evidence within the CMD communication procedure, that is, the dispute lead-in, dispute narration, dispute negotiation and dispute resolution stages, establishing interpretation basis of CMD game for the following chapter from the Discourse Goal Game Model of CMD.Chapter Six makes a goal interpretation towards CMD game within the theoretical framework of Discourse Goal Model of CMD, illustrating that the game activity of CMD is, in essence, the whole game process of mediation participants’mediating goal and intention. This chapter divides into two sections. Based on the goal communication model and goal analysis under the Principle of Goal Direction, Section One concludes that CMD communication, by nature, is a strategically task-driven, goal-oriented discourse communicative activity, and CMD goal can be analyzed from the three levels of discourse goals, that is, discourse expression, response and its interaction together with court-related mediation data as evidences. Section Two makes an analysis and interpretation of discourse goal game mechanism in terms of three levels of discourse goal, that is, discourse goal expression, response and interaction together with court-related mediation data as evidences, justifying that, court-related discourse activity is actually the game process of mediation participants in terms of three levels of speech act, that is, the locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary levels. Driven by their mediation goal, the receiver makes mediation discourse game expression, response and interaction as to the recognition, interpretation and adoption of the producers’discourse expression, response and interaction, so as to achieve their respective mediation maximum utility, coming out either success or failure of the court-related mediation results.Chapter Seven elaborates mediation strategies of CMD game in a macro-sense on the basis of the above description, analysis and interpretation with reference to characteristics of CMD game, including mediation question-response interacted, cooperative-oriented, polite-based, adaptation- loaded, explicit persuasive-driven mediation discourse game strategies, aiming at normalizing the operation of mediation discourse strategies, manipulating game mechanism of CMD, in the hope of achieving maximum utility of discourse game.Chapter Eight comes to the conclusion of the whole dissertation, together with the elaboration of the contribution, limitations and suggestions for future studies as well.This dissertation makes contributions as follows:Firstly, this study collects a large quantity of first-hand, valuable CMD data and makes a qualitative study of CMD with authentic data as the evidences; Secondly, adopting the idea of game theory in economics and applying it to CMD analysis, this dissertation traces back different schools of Views of Language and constructs the Theoretical Framework of this dissertation, that is, Discourse Goal Game Model of CMD; Thirdly, from the perspective of Discourse Goal Game of CMD, this dissertation makes a thorough description, interpretation and normalization of CMD mechanism and mediation strategies, broadening the scope of institutional discourse studies, deepening the understanding and manipulating discourse operation mechanism of CMD, enlarging Chinese discourse studies by means of exploring CMD mechanism and mediation strategies; Last but not least, the findings of this study shares the theoretical implications on courtroom discourse studies, pragmatics and discourse analysis as well, shedding light on practical implications on dispute resolution and social harmonious construction apart from the court-related mediating judicial practices.