Open AccessOn Judge’s Trial Discourse in Chinese Courtroom from Goal-Driven Perspective
Author(s) -
Qing Zhang
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
comparative legilinguistics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 2391-4491
pISSN - 2080-5926
DOI - 10.14746/cl.2019.38.3
Subject(s) - presupposition , perspective (graphical) , action (physics) , control (management) , power (physics) , goal setting , sociology , goal orientation , computer science , rhetoric , psychology , linguistics , social psychology , artificial intelligence , philosophy , physics , quantum mechanics
Any action has a certain goal, and the judge’s trial discourse is a system of goal with structure and level. Judges usually adopt some discourse strategies to achieve the goal of trial. Based on the court trial corpus collected by us, we find that judges often adopt purposeful discourse strategies to achieve the trial goal and discourse goal, such as question-and-answer strategy, power control strategy, presupposition strategy, repetition strategy and interruption strategy. Strategies actually refer to the means by which to achieve the goal of discourse. Because words are used to express and achieve the goal, the choice of means or strategies depends on the choice of the goal. From this perspective, we can see the relationship between strategy and goal. In a sense, strategy is rhetoric. The purpose of this paper is to study the discourse strategies adopted by judges in Chinese courts from the perspective of the goal principle.