Question-response Interaction In Criminal Courtroom Discourse Of The Supreme Court Of The United States:A Corpus-based Study

Due to the close relationship between law and language,more and more attention has been paid to forensic language.Among all of the sub-types of forensic language,courtroom discourse is a special one because of its instantaneity and interactivity,which makes it worth studying.Since question-response interaction is a distinctive feature of courtroom discourse,many scholars have conducted a lot of studies on question-response interaction in courtroom discourse.However,most of the scholars tend to investigate the question-response interaction between lawyers and witnesses,and do not pay equal attention to the interaction between judges and lawyers.So this thesis will make a corpus-based study on question-response interaction between judges and lawyers in criminal courtroom discourse.As the U.S.Supreme Court is known for the heated debates between senior judges and senior lawyers,which makes the question-reponse interaction in courtroom discourse of the U.S.Supreme Court worth studying,the authentic transcribed research materials are extracted from the official website of the Supreme Court of the United States.In order to figure out the linguistic features of question-response interaction of the criminal courtroom discourse of the U.S.Supreme Court,24 transcripts of criminal courtroom discourse are chosen as the representatives after random sampling and tagged both grammatically and functionally with the help of corpus analytical tools and some manual work,which helps to build a corpus.Under the guidance of Liao(2003)'s theory of question-response interaction,this thesis makes a detailed analysis of the linguistic features and classification of the judges' questions and the lawyers' responses.In addition,the question-response interaction patterns generalized from the self-built corpus are examined.What's more,in this thesis the Principle of Goal Direction is employed to conduct an investigation into the questioning and responding strategies of the judges and the lawyers under different sub-goal relationships.The results show that,there are some frequently-used words in the questions proposed by the judges as well as the responses provided by the lawyers;the judges tend to adopt 6 kinds of questions and the lawyers usually employ 3 types of responses.Furthermore,there are altogether 7 patterns of question-response interaction in the criminal courtroom discourse of the U.S.Supreme Court.What's more,both of the judges and the lawyers will adopt various kinds of strategies of proposing questions and providing responses under different sub-goal relationships.This thesis provides a detailed analysis of the question-response interaction in the criminal courtroom discourse of the Supreme Court of the United States,which is of linguistic significance and has some practical value.On the one hand,it can provide some enlightenment for legal professionals in terms of techniques of proposing questions and providing responses.On the other hand,it can offer some references for other studies on question-response interaction in non-legal discourse.