3.2 Narrative Elements...........................14
3.3 The Linguistic Adaption Theory............................15
4 Research Methodology............................................18
4.1 Data Collection...............................18
4.2 Research Methods................................18
4.3 Research Procedure.......................19
5 Results and Discussion........................20
5.1 The Narrative Confrontation at the Investigation Stage........................20
5.2 The Narrative Confrontation at the Cross-Examination Stage................25
5.3 The Narrative Confrontation at the Debate Stage.............................29
5 Results and Discussion
5.1 The Narrative Confrontation at the Investigation Stage
At the investigation stage of criminal court, the public prosecutors and the defenseattorneys have the right to interrogate the defendant Zhang Koukou about the case details.Therefore, at this stage, the narratives of the prosecution party and the defense party arecomposed of direct-examination and cross-examination. How the two sides design theirquestions to construct their narratives through different mental processes in achieving theirpragmatic functions will be discussed below.
Tab.5.1 The discourse of the prosecution party and the defense party at the investigation stage
Example 1 and Example 2 are the extracts from the public prosecutor’s and the defenseattorney’s interrogations of the defendant Zhang Koukou. In Example 1, the prosecution’snarrative is constructed through the public prosecutor’s cross-examination on the defendantZhang Koukou, where the public prosecutor interrogates about the details of Zhang Koukou’sdoing the killing. Cotterill [61]proposes that there are six elements crucial for identifying acrime. These are “perpetrators”, “crimes”, “victim”, “means”, “opportunity” and “motive”. Itcan be observed that the story constructed by the public prosecutor is composed of the sixessential elements, just as Tab.5.2 shows. The prosecution party builds a complete chain ofthe crime through cross-examination, revealing the facts that Zhang Koukou murdered WangZhengjun, Wang Xiaojun and Wang Zixin in a cruel way on the eve of Spring Festival withsufficient preparation out of anger and hatred.
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6 Conclusion
6.1 Major Findings
This thesis takes the transcribed discourse of the case of Zhang Koukou’s intentionalhomicide and vandalism as data and discusses the narrative confrontations between theprosecution party and the defense party in China’s criminal courtrooms. The findings are thatthe two sides are making different linguistic choices and using different strategies at theinvestigation and debate stages of the criminal trial in constructing their respective narratives,which are even conflicting with each other. Therefore, the narrative confrontations betweenthe prosecution party and the defense party occur. During the trials, the public prosecutor andthe defense attorney adapt to the context and choose different narrative elements andpragmatic strategies under different mental processes to construct their narratives, thusrealizing their respective intentions.
At the investigation stage of criminal courts, the narratives of the prosecution party andthe defense party are composed of direct-examination and cross-examination. It can be foundthat the themes of the narrative versions constructed by the two sides are quite different. Thepublic prosecutor, as the representative of the people’s procuratorate, has the responsibilityand obligation to present the facts of the case in court. Therefore, the prosecution partypresents the details and facts of Zhang Koukou’s murder and constructs a complete evidencechain to adapt to the social world, thus realizing the confirmation function. In the narration ofthe defense party, the defense party adapts to the mental world and focuses on ZhangKoukou’s inner world, thus illustrating Zhang Koukou’s motivation for committin
