| Linguistic adaptability includes contextual adaptability,structural adaptability,dynamic adaptability and salient adaptability.Verschueren(1999)pointed out that interaction is adapted in terms of goals,roles,positions and mental status of interlocutors,and strategies are adjusted accordingly throughout the interaction.In the meanwhile,prosodic and kinesic information accompanying the dynamic interaction,especially the Q & R interaction in court trials also plays an important role in the whole process of adaptation in courtroom interaction.The intention of interlocutors in court trails can be conveyed by means of such multimodal information.Over the past two decades,much research has been done on subjects such as language use,roles of participants in court trials,institutional discourse,and power relations.Little attention has been paid to the fact that how multimodal information works in the interaction adaptation of court trials.The case of People’s Procuratorate of Haidian District vs.Shenzhen QVOD Technology Co.,Ltd.in 2016(hereinafter referred to as the CASE)attracted much public attention and thus has been chosen as the subject of the study.The 12-hour court trial video data are transcribed,with the transcription of 230,863 tokens.73-minute data are selected for multimodal annotations,covering three phases of the court trial session,that is,court investigation,proof and cross examination,and court debate respectively.By means of the multimodal annotation tool ELAN,under the analysis framework of the Theory of Linguistic Adaptation,the video data are annotated following 4 major layers of parameter structure such as contextual adaptation,goal attainment,linguistic adaptation and prosodic and kinesic information.The context information,linguistic information,dynamic goal development routes as well as prosodic and kinesic characteristics of courtroom Q & R interaction is analyzed in depth.The multimodal annotation results show that(1)in terms of the contextual adaptation,the background information like courtroom setting,identity and position of various parties in court trials,and the court trial procedure all contribute to the adaptation of the courtroom Q & R interaction.The courtroom Q & R interaction in each stage of the court trail takes place in accordance with the task goal of each stage of the trial and the interaction complies with the above contextual information to ensure a steady progress of court trials.(2)In terms of the dynamic adaptation,various parties in court trials play different roles with different goals in the courtroom Q & R interaction.Different goals in each stage of court trials result in different development routes and the dynamic adaptation of goals.(3)In terms of the structural adaptation,courtroom Q & R interaction patterns are not just limited to question and response pair,but can also be realized by extended variants such as commands and responses,statements and responses,and follow-up questions so as to adapt to the contextual information.In turn-taking interaction,the second part of the turn-taking adapts to the psychological state and goals of the respondent,thus the dispreferred second part is produced,which violates the Cooperative Principle and it is mostly accompanied by hesitation phenomenon.(4)In terms of the characteristics of prosodic and kinesic information,during the process of courtroom Q & R interaction,there appear the movements of eyes,hands,body and head,and variations of intensity,pitch and pauses so as to adapt to the functions of speech acts such as emphasis and explanation. |
