An Analysis of Language in Court : The Use of Presupposition and Conversational Implicature

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This paper analyzes the distinctive characteristics of language used in court. Language used in legal professions has its own features compared to ordinary language used in our everyday life. The aim of this paper is to explain the differences in the two usage variations by applying well-known concepts of pragmatics. Presupposition and Conversational Implicature serve as means to distinguish two different uses of language in the courtroom and in ordinary daily life, respectively. While the language used in court actively utilizes presupposition as a device to reconstruct essential information of testimony, ordinary language shows neutral use of presupposition, meaning that it is not used in favor of one specific party. Furthermore, in contrast to the everyday language use that mostly abides by communicational norms for mutual understanding and better communication, interrogatives used during crossexamination procedure intentionally violate the maxims of quantity and manner. Such violation characterizes the uniqueness of language used in the courtroom. Namely,the distinctiveness of language used in court can be explained in terms of the extraordinary use of presupposition and conversational implicature.This research can be further developed by expanding its range through analysis of additional trial transcripts.

목차 (Table of Contents)

• Ⅰ.Introduction 1
• Ⅱ.Use of Presupposition and Conversational Implicature in Courtroom Interrogatives 3
• 2.1 Courtroom and Court Talk 3
• 2.2 Presupposition and Conversational Implicature 5
• 2.3 Questioning inTrials—Review of Literature 6
• 2.4 Comparative Analysis on Questioning in Cross-examination vs. Ordinary Questioning 7
• Ⅲ.Conclusion 15
• Works Cited 18
• Abstract 19