A Comparative Analysis On Interruption In Chinese And American Courtroom Discourse

At the end of the 20th century,forensic linguistics came into being.Since the beginning of the new century,the focus of the study of legal language has gradually shifted from the static study of legal texts to the dynamic study of court interactive discourse.However,a majority of the previous studies at home and abroad focus on the investigation of the courtroom discourse in a single country,and the research on the court trials between different legal systems is relatively few.Therefore,based on the real court trials,this thesis will use comparative analysis to study a common language phenomenon in Chinese and American courtroom discourse ——interruption,in order that the similarities and differences of courtroom discourse between the two countries can be revealed.This thesis selects transcriptions of 9 court trials from China and 5 court trials from the United States as the research corpus data,which are all criminal cases,and adopts the qualitative and quantitative research methods to analyze the forms and functions of interruption in court discourse in China and the United States in detail,so as to understand the similarities and differences and the reasons of the interruption phenomenon between China and the United States.The questions of this thesis are as follows:1.Is there any difference in frequency of interruption between Chinese and American courtroom discourse?2.What are the forms of interruption in Chinese and American courtroom discourse? Are there any similarities or differences?3.What are the functions of interruption in Chinese and American courtroom discourse?Are there any similarities or differences?Through the comparative study of the forms and functions of interruption in the fourth part,major findings are as follows: in China and the United States,interruption is common,and each participant in the trial is interrupted by others.The judges in the two countries use interruption most frequently compared to other participants,but interruption in the American courtroom discourse is significantly more frequent than that in the Chinese courtroom discourse.In Chinese courtroom discourse,the judge interrupts the defendant most frequently,while in American courtroom discourse,the judge interrupts other court participants more than the defendant.The functions of interruption in Chinese and American courtroom discourse can be divided into two categories: intrusion and cooperation.Intrusive interruption can be divided into four functions: questioning,refusing,topic-shifting and topic-intervening;cooperative interruption can be divided into approving,clarifying and assisting.The frequency of intrusive function is higher than that of cooperative function in the interruption in China and the United States.But specifically speaking,the most frequent intrusive function of interruption in Chinese courtroom is topic-shifting,and the frequencies of questioning and topic-shifting in American court trial are higher than that of other functions,the difference between which is subtle;in terms of cooperative function,approving in Chinese courtroom discourse is significantly more than other cooperative functions,while the frequency of three cooperative functions in American court conversation is roughly the same.This thesis emphasizes the important role of interruption in institutional discourse,which is reflected in different cultures.In addition,this thesis has some theoretical and practical significance.The corpus-based discourse analysis can be extended to other types of discourse;to a certain extent,it can promote the popularization of legal concepts among the masses.Besides,the research on the legal language of China and the United States can possibly make some contributions to the mutual learning and communication between China and the United States in related fields.What’s more,the thesis attempts to improve the pragmatic awareness of the participants in the trial.