| As an important means to settle social disputes, arbitration can protect the benefits of parties,make them resolve differences and then reach an agreement to the utmost extent by tripartite consultation. Therefore, arbitration plays a more and more important role in the legal society nowadays. In arbitration court, arbitrators often adopt various kinds of discourse strategies to maintain court order and intensify their authority. Interruption is one of these discourse strategies. The proper interruptions not only can help arbitrators control the discourse, but also are beneficial to maintain their power and status in arbitration court. Therefore, arbitrators' interruption in arbitration court should be considered as a communicative strategy to exercise power and a sign embodying discourse power, which is worth studying.Based on the Speech Act theory and Critical Discourse Analysis, this study aims to answer the following three questions:(1) What are the types, frequencies and value of power of interruptions used by arbitrators in arbitration court?(2) What are the specific features of each type of interruptions?(3) How do the signals of interruption—discourse markers help arbitrators to interrupt successfully and adjust their power in arbitration court?This study collected 18 authentic recordings of arbitration cases. We chose the arbitration mediation in which arbitrators used interruptions more frequently than other procedures in arbitration court and constructed a mini spoken corpus with 158,992 Chinese characters. With qualitative, quantitative and corpus methods, this study used corpus tools to annotate arbitrators' interruptions and discourse markers and calculated the frequencies and ratios of them.The major findings are as follows:(1) The interruptions used by arbitrators in arbitration court can be divided into three groups: conflicting interruptions of high value of power, soft interruptions of median value of power and emotional interruptions of low value of power. Flexible using of different types of interruptions in appropriate contexts can not only show arbitrators' institutional power and identities in arbitration court, but also help arbitrators maintain the order of court and control the whole procedure.(2) The soft interruptions used most frequently by arbitrators possess euphemistic tone and moderate coerciveness, which can help them establish the roles of mediators or intermediaries with objectivity and fairness. In contrast, the conflicting interruptions possess direct expression, tough tone and high extent of face-threaten which show that arbitrators play the roles of people in power or mandators. The emotional interruptions seldom used by arbitrators possess gentle tone, low coerciveness and more personal emotion, which can help them establish the roles of persuaders or peacemakers. In arbitration court, arbitrators flexibly use different types of interruptions and switch roles, which can help them temper justice with mercy, and then improve efficiency of the trial.(3) Discourse markers are not only signals of interruption, but also kinds of discourse resources and regulators. Arbitrators using interruptions with discourse markers can realize different communicative goals.In conclusion, arbitrators' interruptions in arbitration court are closely linked with their power. At the same time, the discourse markers also play essential roles in arbitration court discourses. On one hand, arbitrators' institutional power and identities provide a guarantee to interruptions. On the other hand, arbitrations' interruptions also maintain their institutional power and status. Therefore, in the real arbitration court, arbitrators should use interruptions properly and reasonably. Especially, they should use the soft interruptions of median value as much as possible, and incorporate discourse markers appropriately into interruptions, which can not only help them control the discourse and maintain their power, but also improve the efficiency of trial and achieve the goals of mediation. |
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