Title: The defendant's dilemma: being cooperative without compromising their defence
Speaker: Dr. Yan Chen (University of Leeds)
Abstract: In Chinese criminal trials, defendants face the dual tasks of providing information as “an object of interrogation” and defending themselves as a defendant. Against such a backdrop, they face the dilemma of being cooperative and defensive at the same time. This research investigates the practices they use to navigate this dilemma. A corpus linguistic analysis identifies two key features in defendants’ language, including negation, and words associated with narration. These point to three main practices: defending with a partial denial, accounting for an “unexpected” lack of knowledge, and persuading through an uninvited account, which are explored through a fine-grained conversation analysis. Linguistic devices such as indirect responses, double verb constructions, extreme case formulations, and the mood adverb “也(ye)” are found to contribute to the negotiation of the dilemma. It is found that a balance of defence and cooperation is key to a defensive response in the Chinese courtroom.
Keywords: defendants’ responses, courtroom talk, interactional dilemma, Chinese criminal trials, conversation analysis, corpus linguistics
