A Study On Vagueness And Elimination Of Vagueness In Courtroom Interaction Discourse

As a typical institutional discourse,courtroom discourse features interactivity,goal-direction and conflict.Due to the conflicting goals,prosecutors and defendants choose different language strategies to achieve their communicative intentions.In the stage of courtroom investigation,vagueness is often used as a pragmatic strategy by the defendant.However,in order to clarify the truth of the case and provide factual basis for the judgment,the prosecutor will use corresponding strategies to eliminate vagueness used by defendants.Taking 25 public real criminal cases as the data,based on relevance theory and theory of adaptability,this thesis aims to study how defendants employ vagueness to achieve the pragmatic functions and how prosecutors eliminate vagueness in defendants’ discourse by means of conversation analysis.Firstly,this thesis makes quantitative statistics and classification of the defendant’s use of vague language.Secondly,the thesis explains how the defendant uses vagueness and how the prosecutor eliminates vagueness from the four levels:phonology,lexicon,syntax and discourse.Finally,this thesis discusses the pragmatic functions of vagueness and how the asymmetric power relationship under the influence of institution identity is manifested in the process of employing and eliminating vagueness.The findings suggest that,first,the use of vagueness at the level of phonology is mainly manifested by faded pitch and disjointed articulation;at the level of lexicon,vagueness features the use of approximator,deixis and euphemism;in the aspect of syntax,vagueness is mainly characterized by modal operator and mood adjunct;at the level of discourse,vagueness is mainly achieved through indirect answer and irrelevant answer.Second,defendants with lower power choose to use vagueness as pragmatic strategy to achieve the purposes of providing appropriate information,self-protection,adjusting utterance force,filling lexical gaps,withholding information and face saving.Third,the prosecutor would use echo question,formulation,metapragmatic comments and topic control to eliminate vagueness in the defendant’s utterances and control the direction of conversation.Fourth,whether vagueness will be eliminated depends on the relevance of defendants’ answers and how prosecutors interpret defendants’ intentions.The language choice of vagueness and elimination of vagueness between the prosecutor and the defendant adapts to physical,mental and social worlds of communicative context in courtroom and the adaptability is shown in the linguistic choice at the phonological,lexical,syntactic and discourse levels.Fifth,due to the different institutional identities,the prosecutor often has more discourse power,which leads to the power asymmetry in turn-taking structure and discourse resources.Theoretically,this thesis combines relevance theory with theory of adaptability to analyze the linguistic characteristics of vagueness and elimination of vagueness from different linguistic levels,hopefully providing a foundation and reference for further study;What’s more,this thesis attempts to provide courtroom participants with some suggestions of how to use language strategies effectively,and bring them some inspiration to give defendants proper discourse right so as to control and promote the court investigation process,to clarify the truth of the cases.