A Tentative Study Of Incompatible Utterances In Courtroom Interaction

Courtroom interaction has always been the focus of study in forensic linguistics. Although many of the researches have been concerned with the study of linguistic features of participants in court hearing, most of them have neglected the situation of incompatible utterances in interaction, without considering the underlying cause of this special type of conversation. Moreover, the ultimate purpose of questioning has rarely been discussed, in spite of the fact that various kinds of questioning and answering strategies have been discussed in the previous studies. Thus, this study aims to explore the cause and solution of incompatible utterances in courtroom interaction from the perspective of conversation analysis.To accomplish the research objective in this study, the theoretical framework based on the principle of goal direction is established for the exploration of the language used by participants in court hearing. On the basis of case studies, it is found that answerers’ responses in court hearing are the major factors that influence the smooth development of the conversation. The conflicting goals between answerers and questioners are a major cause of incompatible utterances. Answerers are inclined to provide answers either in incompatible form or in incompatible meaning, with the aim of protecting their own interests or others’interests. It is also found that the questions proposed by questioners mainly have three types of ultimate goals: eliciting information, extracting a confession or refuting testimony. Eliciting information means that the questioner attempts to acquire desired facts from the opposing party; extracting a confession is to persuade the defendant to admit guilt in court; and refuting testimony means to raise doubts about the accuracy of the testimony. In addition, shift of topics, rephrasing key questions, providing options and summarizing answers are effective strategies employed by questioners to obtain desired answers.This study concludes that in the incompatible situations the acquisition of desired answers is accomplished through questioning strategies with specific goals. The major contribution of this study lies in addressing incompatible utterances in courtroom interaction from the perspective of conversation analysis and the principle of goal direction. Moreover, the study based on authentic data has revealed the hierarchical structures in the process of questioning and established basic procedures for the analysis of incompatible utterances in courtroom discourse.