Intonation Features Of Yes-no Questions And Their Discoursal Functions In China Courtroom Conversation

As the main part of the court trial,questioning-and-answering plays a key role in the whole process because it has the following functions.Firstly,the most important task of court trial is to find the truth of the cases by asking questions.Secondly,the litigants can ask the defendants or the witnesses for information or query the validity of the statement from different aspects.In addition,questioning-and-answering can help solve the conflict of interest in the courtroom.The defenders can defend the defendants by asking proper questions.Thirdly,the court trial is a process of interpreting the legal principles.Based on the truth,the court trial must decide the nature of the case,the criminal responsibility or civil liabilities and the application of law.As a result,the court trial is the dynamic and core part which deserves our great attention.As we all know,the court trial is to find the truth and interpret the legal principles through courtroom investigations and courtroom arguments,and the purpose is to deal with the cases fairly and legally.In order to carry out the trial objectively and fairly,and make the process proceed more efficiently,the judicial personnel should bear in mind the following two things.First,the judge and the public prosecutor are required to master some certain questioning techniques.In the courtroom conversation,the purpose of questioning is to get the correct and true testimony no matter the questioner is criminal judge,civil judge or the public prosecutor.Second,the questioning should make the interrogated feel “comfortable”.As a result,the questioning should follow the basic but important principle which can be applied in all legal fields—the interrogated has known all the information that we want to obtain.Therefore,we must pay attention to how the answerers respond to the question.As for oral communication,intonation plays a key role in delivering information,which makes different intonations expressing different meanings possible.This paper regards the questioning-and-answering patterns in modern China court trial as the research object based on Grice’s Cooperative Principle and Searle’s Speech Act Theory as the theoretical framework.This paper pays close attention to how the information gets across from the perspective of intonation and information focus.Therefore,the writer carries out an empirical research on the functions of yes-no questions in the court trial.To be specific,this paper includes the following three research questions:(1)What are the discoursal functions and intonation features of yes-no questions in court trial?(2)How are the functions distributed according to speakers’ roles in courtroom conversation?(3)Whether the types of focus can influence the functions of yes-no questions?Based on twenty-six CCTV12 “Court Hearing Scene” and four official micro-blog live videos(30 cases)as the corpus,this paper tries to analyze the intonation features of yes-no questions and discourse functions in court trial conversation,using Praat--a speech analysis software,as well as the qualitative and quantitative research methods.Research shows that when the yes-no question contains contrastive focus,the pitch changes obviously.And the contrastive focus receives the highest pitch and the widest range of pitch.The discourse functions are more expressed as: emphasizing,oppugning or refuting,reminding;When the semantic focus receives no obvious pitch change,yes-no question tends to ask for information;contrarily,upbraiding,adaptation,and other functions are expressed.