Preference organization in PRC criminal trial interaction
Defendant resistance and enforced compliance
Liz Carter | University of California, Los Angeles
This paper analyzes resistance in the preference organization of criminal trial interaction from a conversation analytic
perspective, with examples taken from an 11-hour video corpus of 20 PRC (People’s Republic of China) criminal trials from 2016–2018.
Defendants’ dispreferred responses to judges’ questions are then analyzed to determine how resistance is constructed and handled by judges.
Defendants are found to construct resistance implicitly and orient to out-of-courtroom stance, objects and topics, while judges respond by
reorienting to broader legal matters of guilt and in-court actions. Previous research on PRC criminal trials has focused mainly on questions
and turn formulation by judges and procurators (Liao, 2003, 2012; Gao, 2003; Zhang and Jin, 2004; Meng, 2009); this study complements existing research by analyzing defendants’ speech in its
interactional context.
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