Study Of Discursive Confrontation As Micro-strategies Of Facework In Chinese Court Settings

As the issue of the impoliteness,manifested as facework micro-strategies,has recently become more and more prevalent,impoliteness in courtroom settings has drawn a considerable attention among forensic linguists.Based on a corpus of court settings discourse,this paper attempts to examine what types of micro-strategies the conflict discourse incurs,unfold what effects that these strategies bring about and scrutinize why the interlocutors resort to confrontational discourses.Theoretically speaking,this paper deepens the study of face issue,differentiates the mianzi and lian as two separate conceptions,and applies the mental world of adaptation theory to discuss motivations of speakers.Practically speaking,it is also conducive to Chinese judicial reform of centring-the-trial in that the jurisdiction should be centred to the conservation of the judicial resources which should be devoted to enhancing the efficiency of the trial procedure and prevent wasting the judicial resources from wrangling.In order to investigate the aforesaid issue,qualitative and quantitative research methods are adopted;a framework of micro-strategies of facework,a questionnaire and an in-depth interview with a judge are designed.The data are firstly annotated to find out the variant micro-strategies of facework based on the framework proposed by Penman;then the effects of those micro-strategies are discussed through the analysis of data;finally,the paper deploys the mental world of the Theory of Adaptation to probe into speakers’ motivations.To guarantee the credibility of annotation and analysis,an elaborately designed questionnaire is employed to test the attitude and recognition on the part of ordinary people.Moreover,a judge,the decision-maker,who might be influenced by the impoliteness utterances,is interviewed to test the effects.The study has yielded the following findings.Firstly,impoliteness,defined as an intentional a strategy used in the facework in Chinese courtroom is variable in its categories,including interruption,maintenance of the order,depreciation,questioning with statement,over-informativeness,and self-defence.Secondly,the abovementioned micro-strategies yield the following effects:(1)rebuked by the judge,(2)accepted by the judge,or(3)disciplined by the judge.Thirdly,this paper proposes motivations of interlocutors,encompassing gaining sympathy,expressing emotion,and protecting face,which are underlain by the deep motivation of protection and pursuit of their legal interests in the courtroom.Generally speaking,this paper sheds some light on the research on impoliteness and facework,and will help to gain a deeper understanding of the essence of face issues in courtroom interaction.Specifically,future studies can use this paper’s research paradigm for reference,namely,investigating from strategies to effects and finding the underlying motivation,and testing the appropriateness of research is tested by the positive research method such as questionnaires and personal in-depth interviews.