A Social Semiotic Study Of Popularization Of Courtroom Discourse

Legal language is a highly professionalized language variety,which is“exclusive” to the general public who lack legal expertise.Between legal workers such as judges and prosecutors and the general public,there are asymmetries in not only knowledge of law but also legal language,and this linguistic asymmetry might further exacerbate injustice and inequality in judicial practices.As a typical type of legal language,courtroom discourse inherits the characteristics of high professionalization and is inaccessible to the general public to a certain extent,which would affect their fair access to the law in trial.Whereas the law is made for the general public with its ultimate goal of achieving judicial justice,the inaccessibility of legal language might affect the realization of this goal.In the new era in China,the law also needs to serve the construction of the rule of law and the rural revitalization.The general public not only are supposed to abide by the laws,but also need to know and understand those laws and regulations.In other words,they need to understand the language of the law.Therefore,how to help the general public understand the courtroom discourse is an important issue that needs to be solved urgently.Focusing on the “popularization of courtroom discourse”,this study investigates the cases from the grass-roots courts in southeastern Chongqing collected from China Court Trial Online.Aiming at promoting the intelligibility of judicial language for the general public,the current study proposes countermeasures and suggestions for the popularization of courtroom discourse in such less developed areas.This study also expounds the rationale and rationality for the popularization of courtroom discourse from the perspectives of systemic functional linguistics(SFL)and legitimation code theory(LCT).Thus,this study explores the popularization of courtroom discourse in the background of rural vitalization in Chinese context,highlighting the appliability and social accountability of SFL in dealing with language-related problems,and addressing the following three issues:(1)What are the lexical,syntactic,and stylistic features that may cause inaccessibility for general public in comprehending courtroom discourse?(2)What popularization strategies can be employed to improve the general public’s understanding of courtroom discourse?(3)How can social semiotics be adopted to expound the rationale and rationality of the popularization of courtroom discourse?This study has shown that courtroom discourse may be incomprehensible to the general public who lack legal expertise.Lexically,legal terms and nominalizations are often used in courtroom discourse.Legal terms are highly professionalized,generalized,and ambiguous,and nominalization is abstract,ambiguous,and condensed,both of which would increase the semantic density of clauses and cause understanding difficulties for the general public.Syntactically,long sentences,complex sentence structures,and “de(的)” structures are often used in courtroom discourse,which are inclined to cause understanding difficulties for the general public and hinder their communication with legal workers.Stylistically,courtroom discourse presents linguistic features such as rigorous formality,standardization,and formating,which may also cause understanding difficulties for the general public.In order to solve the inaccessibility of courtroom discourse,it is necessary to propose appropriate measures and discourse strategies for the popularization of courtroom discourse from lexical,syntactic and stylistic levels.Lexically,legal workers such as judges and prosecutors should not only reduce legal terms and nominalization in courtroom discourse,but also elaborate and vernacularize the legal terms which are difficult for the general public to understand,and rephrase nominalization to a congruence form.Syntactically,legal workers should shorten the long sentences,simplify complex sentences,reduce the use of “de(的)” structures and some unusual special question-asking sentence patterns,and strive to present the courtroom discourse in spoken form.Stylistically,legal workers are encouraged to adopt discursive strategies to improve the comprehensibility of the courtroom discourse,such as explanation,restatement,weakening semantic density,and information supplementation in specific situations.On the other hand,SFL and LCT can provide theoretical guidance for the inaccessibility and popularization of courtroom discourse from the perspectives of knowledge and knower.From the perspective of knowledge,SFL can explain the inaccessibility and popularization of courtroom discourse via its theories of transitivity,thematic structure,grammatical metaphor,and context.In view of transitivity,process verbs may embody the culture and ideology of courtroom discourse,along with the power relations and attitudes of legal workers,which can cause understanding difficulties for the general public.Legal workers should convert the transitive process of some clauses to increase the possibility for the general public to understand the discourse.For the thematic structure,courtroom discourse may be composed of multiple clauses with certain thematic progression patterns between them and different modes of thematic progression may cause different understandings especially when the courtroom discourse is orally presented.In order to facilitate the comprehensibility of the discourse,legal workers should try to apply appropriate thematic progression patterns with smooth semantic and logical relations.As for grammatical metaphor,it is a type of genre-related variant which is frequently used in formal genres such as legal discourse and scientific discourse and pertinent lexicogrammatical transference and transcategorization(such as nominalization)may make the discourse more abstract and ambiguous.In addition,grammatical metaphors are also related to semogenesis,and people who are poorly-educated seldom use grammatical metaphor and have difficulties in understanding them.Therefore,legal workers should reduce the use of grammatical metaphors as much as possible in trials,and convert appropriate grammatical metaphors into their congruence counterparts.In terms of context,courtroom discourse can be characterized as technical discourse,which can undoubtedly cause understanding difficulty for people who are short of professional knowledge.The field and tenor of the courtroom discourse are unchangeable to a certain extent,but its mode can be altered into a more colloquial way,which can reduce the understanding difficulty for the general public and make the courtroom discourse more accessible.From the perspective of the knower,LCT can be exploited to explain the inaccessibility and popularization of courtroom in the theory of knowledge structure,particularly in the models of specialization code and semantics code.Based on this theory,the language codes used between legal workers and the general public in the courtroom discourse are different: while legal workers use elaborated codes,the general public use restricted codes.Hence,during the trial,legal workers should use more restricted codes and non-academic discourse,so that they would be on the same communication platform with the general public to ensure smooth communication between them.With regard to specialization codes,according to their topological space,the discourse used by judges,prosecutors and other legal workers in the trial generally belongs to the knowledge code,while the non-legal language(i.e.ordinary language)used by the general public belongs to the relative code.Thus,in the trial,legal workers should play the role of “intermediary” to convert the knowledge code to a relative code,and the general public should also try to improve their knowledge code to improve their comprehensibility of the discourse.For semantic codes,the semantic density of the courtroom discourse is strong and its semantic gravity is weak.Therefore,in the trial,legal workers are expected to weaken the semantic density of language to improve the general public’s understanding of the courtroom discourse.