Zhong Hefei
ABSTRACT
This study investigates the rhetorical and pedagogical functions of speech acts in Chinese courtroom discourse. Grounded in Austin’s and Searle’s theories, it explores how speech acts construct meaning and reinforce institutional authority, with implications for legal education. The dataset comprises 40,687 words from ten English-translated transcripts of administrative hearings in the “QIAODAN” trademark case before China’s Supreme People’s Court. Through qualitative discourse analysis, utterances were categorized into five speech act types: representatives, directives, commissive, expressives, and declarations. Representatives (52.8%) and directives (44.0%) dominate, comprising 96.8% of total speech acts, highlighting the centrality of factual assertion and procedural control. Judges, particularly the presiding judge, primarily employed directives and declarations to manage proceedings and assert institutional power. Legal representatives favored representatives to construct persuasive arguments. Minimal use of commissive and expressive underscores the formal and impersonal nature of courtroom language. The findings demonstrate that speech acts offer a robust framework for analyzing legal discourse and developing pedagogical strategies in courtroom communication. Rhetorically, the analysis reveals how strategic deployment of speech acts underpins persuasive authority and procedural management in legal settings. Pedagogically, integrating speech acts into legal education can strengthen students’ analytical skills. It is recommended that legal training programs incorporate targeted speech act analysis exercises—using authentic transcript excerpts—to better prepare future practitioners for effective courtroom communication.
Keywords: Speech act theory, courtroom discourse, forensic linguistics, legal pragmatics, pedagogical application
https://doi.org/10.57180/ptrk6720