Conversation and Cooperation in the Courtroom Cross-Examination

by JLS
for the GC

Abstract from

http://web.bham.ac.uk/forensic/IAFL03/abstracts.html

M. LIAO, Meizhen, "Cooperation in ... courtroom interaction"

"It is universally acknowledged among linguists that human beings observe certain rules or maxims or principles in their conversation or verbal interaction."

"Of all the rules, the most important and the most influential seems to be "the co-operative principle" formulated by Grice."

"Ever since the publication of the co-operative principle, an imposingly great number of articles or monographs have been devoted to the topic."

"However, the literature focuses almost exclusively on everyday conversation and "reduction" (of the maxims) has been the trend and the defining feature of the study."

"So far, no attempt has been made to study the co-operative principle in the context of courtroom trials, although maxims of the co-operative principle were mentioned sporadically in articles devoted to courtroom discourse analysis."

"Based on transcriptions of recordings of 13 courtroom trials amounting to 900,000 words, the present paper tests the co-operative principle in courtroom discourse analysis and tries to address the following questions."

"(1) Although cases have been presented
where the co-operative principle does NOT apply, yet
no systematic criteria have been established for
the application of the co-operative principle."

"(2) Does the co-operative principle apply to
courtroom discourse, which is a special case of
institutional discourses governed by
special rules and procedures?"

"(3) What implications does courtroom discourse
have for study of the co-operative principle and
co-operation in general?"

"The author arrives at the following conclusions."

"(1) Human communicative acts are goal-directed
and we take this as a principle underlining human
behavior (the principle of the universality of goals in human
behavior, or the principle of goal analysis). Study of
co-operation entails study of goals."

"(2) People may enter into an activity with different goals
and there are different goal relationships. We can distinguish at
least four relationships in terms of goals".

"(a) goals convergent-participants having the same goal"
"(b) goals conflicting-participants having conflicting goals"
"(c) goals neutral-participants having goals which are neutral to each other, and "
"(d) goals unknown-participants having goals which are not known to each other"

"(3) Analysis of goal relations applies before the co-operative principle."

"Goal analysis applies before the cooperative principle."

"(4) As there are different goal relations, there will naturally
be co-operation and non-co-operation and there are degrees of co-operation.
When goals converge, the classical co-operative principle
surely applies and study of co-operation is to focus on implicatures."

"When goals conflict, the classical co-operative principle does
not apply. However, this does not mean that no co-operation
exists between participants. Thus how one participant makes the
opposing participant adopt his or her goal(s) becomes the task of
the study of co-operation. When goals are neutral or not known
to each other, the co-operative principle may apply or may not, co-operation being controlled by factors cultural, ethnical, etc."

"(5) As there are divergent goal relations in courtroom trials, the
classical co-operative principle proves to be both applicable and
non-applicable. In this case, the best approach to the study of
cooperation is the model of cooperation degree analysis."

"(6) As courtroom discourse tends to be explicit, "implicature" is
not the focus of study of co-operation."

----- [I disagree on that front, and I'm, with J, all for the study of some of the 'manipulating implicatures'. JLS]

"(7) In courtroom discourse, study of degree of co-operation is
the most important and most interesting question."