Defendant examination in Chinese criminal trials: stance conveyance by legal professionals and defendants

China is conducting a ‘trial-centred’ judicial reform, which highlights the critical role of trials to verify evidence and deliver justice. This research aims to contribute a linguistic perspective to that reform based on a study of defendant examination in 49 transcribed Chinese criminal trials. Specifically, this research looks at how legal professionals and defendants negotiate with each other in defendant examination while holding different stances, which makes stance conveyance tricky, in particular, stance alignment: ‘the act of calibrating the relationship between two stances, and by implication between two stancetakers’ (Du Bois, 2007, p.144). This research explores stance alignment by drawing on two main concepts: alignment and affiliation, which refer to cooperation at the structural and affective level respectively (Stivers et al., 2011).
A combined conversation analysis and corpus-based approach is triangulated by interviews with legal professionals. This research examines legal professionals’ stance conveyance in their repetition of defendants’ responses, defendants’ methods of conveying disaffiliating stance, and the impact of stance (non-)display on narrative construction in the courtroom. The analysis reveals that legal professionals might choose to conceal their stances strategically in questioning defendants. Defendants are also found to conceal their defensiveness in their responses by maintaining structural alignment. Similarly, in narrative construction during the questioning stage, prosecutors often convey their stances subtly through structural (dis)alignment. Their implicit stance conveyance during the questioning stage results in narrative transformation in their closing arguments. This research enhances the understanding of stance alignment by distinguishing between structural alignment and affective affiliation and enriches stance analysis by highlighting its interactive nature.
Based on a relatively large dataset, this research provides a panoramic view of Chinese criminal trial discourse and reveals problems in the institutional design of the trial and the imbalance between the prosecution and defence, both of which have implications for further judicial reform.