Chen, Y. orcid.org/0009-0009-7838-3703 and May, A. orcid.org/0000-0002-8757-8053 (2024) Other-Repetition to Convey and Conceal the Stance of Institutional Participants in Chinese Criminal Trials. International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique, 37. pp. 399-428. ISSN 0952-8059
Abstract
Based on the examination of 49 Chinese criminal trials transcribed from the audio-visual recordings on the ‘China Court Trial Online’ website (https://tingshen.court.gov.cn/), the institutional participants–prosecutors, defence lawyers, and judges–are found to frequently repeat defendants’ responses (‘other-repetition’), after a question–answer adjacency pair. Other-repetition has been described as a resource for showing participation and familiarity (Tannen 2007), initiating repair and registering receipt (Schegloff 1997), and displaying understanding and emotional stance (Svennevig 2004). However, other-repetition in trial discourse has not been thoroughly researched. Therefore, this article aims to further examine this salient institutional linguistic feature in order to explore stance construction as a third turn. It is common to associate certain prosodic features of a repetition with the stance of the speaker. However, prosody may not be a reliable cue for stance interpretation in Chinese courtrooms, as institutional participants might conceal their stance during a repetition. Though they are more explicit in displaying their stance with turn-initial repeats, the distinction between the prosody of repeats for different functions is not categorical. It is found that defendants are sensitive to the lexicogrammar and multimodal cues for stance interpretation.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: | |
Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © The Author(s) 2024. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
Keywords: | Other-repetition, Chinese courtroom, Multimodal, Stance, Prosody, Criminal trial |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Cultures (Leeds) > School of English (Leeds) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 14 Feb 2024 11:12 |
Last Modified: | 28 Feb 2024 16:04 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Springer |
Identification Number: | 10.1007/s11196-023-10063-6 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:209167 |