Conversation Analysis in Courtroom Discourse

Abstract

From the perspective of qualitative study, the author analyzes the implicature in the courtroom discourse. During the courtroom interaction, different participants will employ conversational implicature to achieve his/her purpose, violating cooperative principle is the important tool of generating conversational implicature. Moreover, for the lawyer, the function of implicature is to undermine the creditability of the testimony. While, for the defendant, he/she will prove his/her innocent and the real testimony that he/she provided. Studies on Conversation Analysis Conversation analysis is the approach to the study of the social interaction, including both verbal and non-verbal conduct, in situations of everyday life. It is a kind of established method which has been used in different fields, such as sociology, anthropology, linguistics and psychology. Grice has proposed four conversational maxims. It is the way to explain the link between utterances and what is understood from them. Four maxims of cooperative principle have been mentioned by Grice [1], including the maxim of quality, the maxim of quantity, the maxim of relevance and the maxim of manner. In the courtroom interaction, a maxim is flouted by the different participants is in the hope of the hearer understanding the implied meaning, that is, conversational implicature. Just as Grice stated that "conversational implicaure is the utterance conveyed the implied meaning during the communication". Just as Mey(2001) has mentioned that " in daily communication, we try to convey propositions that are implicit in our utterances but are merely implied them. Sometimes we are able to draw such inferences only by referring what has been explicitly said to some conversational principle". [2] Implicature can be considered as the utterance conveyed the implied meaning. Just as Grice has mentioned that "it is a kind of utterance that implied in the conversation or can be regarded as something embedded in the communication". Hu Ying has stated that the utterance is implicit in the language use." Therefore, in the process of understanding, the common knowledge and the inference ability of both the speaker and the hearer are playing the important part. Therefore, implicature is not the meaning referring to the semantic inference, but the inference based on the content of what has been said and the assumptions in order to serve the communication. In order to convey the real purpose and intention, the speaker should violate the maxims so that the hearer can understand the meaning from the utterance and inference of the speaker. It can be called conversation implicature.