An Interactive Study On Chinese Criminal Courtroom Narrative Discourse

Criminal Courtroom Narrative Discourse (CCND in short) refers to the natural and coherent discourse, either spoken or written, about the account of case facts, by litigators in the context of criminal courtroom trials. Interactivity is the typical feature of this special form of institutional discourse, to which little attention was paid either abroad or at home in China, although quite some work has been done to courtroom discourse and courtroom narrative respectively.Based on a self-made small-scale corpus of about 1.8 million words which were transcribed by the author from tape-recordings of criminal courtroom trials in China, the present study makes a static description of the structure of Chinese Criminal Courtroom Narrative Discourse (CCCND in short) and a qualitative analysis on the interaction of CCCND within the framework of Narrative Interaction, with the findings that (1) CCCND is hierarchically structured on three levels, namely the macro level which offers a criminal courtroom context only (macro-narrative discourse of CCCND), the medium level made up of master narrative discourse and the micro level made up of embedded narrative discourse. CCCND on the medium and micro levels is the focus of this study, which could be analyzed by the OCPIE model with five basic elements, i.e. orientation, core narrative, point, interpretation and end; (2) interaction of CCCND has its own feature and rule, being rational, hierarchical, directional, complicated, goal-oriented and strategic; (3) Rational Interaction is the theory that implies to the interaction of CCCND, and to the interaction of general Courtroom Discourse (CD), as we wish.The present study is of theoretical and practical significance. Theoretically, the construction of OCPEE Narrative Model and the theory of Rational Interaction could explain the phenomenon of interaction in the context of courtroom trials, which helps to enlarge the space of study on courtroom discourse and narrative discourse. Practically, the findings and result of this dissertation could benefit Chinese judicial linguistic practice, especially the implication of narrative discourse in courtroom trials and the writing of.legal paper work.