Viewing courtroom discourse as a process started early and evolved into a mature area. Atkinson and Drew[8] discuss the sequence structure in Anglo-American adversarial courtroom through the analysis of that between witnesses and barristers. In the book Language in the Judicial Process, Levi and Walker[9] brought together 12 papers concerned with language phenomenon in courtroom practices written by some of the influential researchers. The work covers a wide range of topics including the verbal strategies between barristers and witnesses in cross-examination, the narrative structure, the role of interpreters in bilingual courtroom. Through a global view in courtroom discourse, the authors seek to account for the role of language in legal process. The interaction among barristers, witnesses, defendants and judges is examined carefully such as the “restatement’ strategies used by barristers to control what witnesses answer.
In China, the earliest scholar who studies the interaction in courtroom discourse is Liao in his work Studies on Question-answer and Interaction in Courtroom which analyzes the language mechanism and features of interaction, offering constructive guidance to related scholars and Chinese court revolution[10].
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2.2 Studies on politeness
The issue with regards to politeness is ubiquitous over a long history across the world. All social communities have their own conventional ways of showing politeness stipulated explicitly or implicitly from addressing, greeting, asking, invitation, to dressing code and appropriate behavior. It is even believed that politeness plays a crucial role in establishing and strengthening social ties as the prerequisite and fundamental rule of normal interaction and successful cooperation between people. Significant though it is, it is only from the publication of Brown & Levinson’s seminal work in the 1970s that it has gained increasing academic interest, evolving to an individual subject for close examination. Over the past 40 years, there was a perceptual shift of politeness in terms of its concept, view, and methodology away from the first wave approaches to second wave approaches marked by Gino Eelen’s work: A Critique of Politeness Theories. The distinction is made by second order, theoretical, or linguistically grounded approaches to (im)politeness and first order, lay, or socially perceived approaches to the phenomenon respectively[16].
Over the past four decades politeness theory has been actively developed. The following is a brief outline of its theory development. The ‘first wave’ represented by Lakoff (1973), Leech (1983) and Brown and Levinson(1987) forms its pragmatic period by the second order approach. As a pioneer of politeness research, Lakoff follows Grice’s suggestion that there are possibly other maxims involved besides those of the Cooperative Principle[3]. Leech’s early contribution to the formation of politeness theory rests in his illustration of the ‘Politeness Principle (PP)’ including 6 politeness maxims under his ‘Interpersonal Rhetoric’ framework to rescue the CP[1].
Fig. 3.4.2 Appraisal Theory for analysis
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3 Theoretical Framework .......................................... 15
3.1 The concept of impoliteness............................................. 15
3.2 Politeness principle and Chinese polite expressions....................... 17
3.3 Attitude System from Appraisal Theory.............
