A Comparative Study Of Metadiscourse In Chinese Criminal Court Debate

Court debate is found to be a critical part of litigation proceedings through examining Chinese courtroom videos,which could influence the judge’s understanding of the crime and even the defendant’s final conviction and sentencing.Apart from superior flexibility and vast professional knowledge,excellent language skills also play a vital role in court debate.Though linguists have raised lots of suggestions about language use in this respect,only a few notice the contribution of metadiscourse in court debate.However,metadiscourse plays an integral role in constructing discourse,particularly in persuasive discourse.Therefore,this study aims to compare metadiscourse in the Chinese criminal court debate,centering on the prosecutor and the defender’s arguments.Specifically,the following three questions are to be answered: 1)What are the overall distributions of various metadiscourse resources in the prosecutor and the defender’s arguments? 2)How could these metadiscourse resources be used as the three rhetorical means? 3)What are both parties’ main communicative purposes with the aid of metadiscourse? To answer these questions,this study collects 30 Chinese criminal trials,takes Hyland’s classification mode to metadiscourse and Aristotle’s rhetorical mode as theoretical foundation,and conducts both quantitative and qualitative analyses of metadiscourse in court debate.The results show that 1)Metadiscourse is a nonnegligible language phenomenon in court debate,and both interactive and interactional metadiscourse are important language resources in prosecutor and defender’s arguments.More precisely,both parties tend to use many transitions in their arguments,and engagement markers are also extensively adopted.However,both parties use only a few endophoric markers,code glosses,and hedges also appear not frequently.In terms of the difference in distributions,there are only significant differences in frequencies of evidentials and hedges among the thirteen sets of data.Specifically,the prosecutor evidently uses more evidentials,while the defender uses more hedges in court debate.2)A detailed analysis shows that metadiscourse in court debate could be used as three rhetorical means for effective communication.In particular,evidentials,hedges,boosters and self-mentions could be used as ethical means;transitions,frame markers,endophoric markers and code glosses are used as rational means,while hedges,attitude markers and engagement markers are used as emotional means.Generally,both parties prefer ethos and logos in the three rhetorical means,in which logos is the most popular one.Pathos occupies a larger part in the defender’s arguments than in the prosecutor’s arguments.3)These metadiscourse resources could help both the prosecutor and the defender to achieve specific communicative purposes.Generally,the prosecutor mainly adopts metadiscourse to arouse the public’s empathy,prove the legitimacy of charges in the indictment,stimulate the defendant’s reflection on crime,deepen his image of fairness and justice,and connect a single case with social governance.In contrast,the defender tries to use metadiscourse to weaken the defendant’s criminal nature,praise the defendant’s positive actions,build a trustworthy image,show politeness to the judge and construct collective consciousness with the audience.This study enriches researches on metadiscourse in Chinese discourse and offers a new perspective to study courtroom language.Additionally,it may provide some inspiration for legal workers to improve language skills and for other participants to better understand the speaker’s communicative intention.