How Does Interpreter’s Intonation Affect the Pragmatics of Courtroom Questions? A Case Study of Chinese-English Court Interpreting

Intonation is an important paralinguistic feature helping to convey the speaker's intention. Court interpreting studies have revealed the impact of the interpreter's lexical/syntactic choices and the addition/omission of discourse markers, hesitations and pauses on the pragmatics of courtroom interactions. However, existing studies on court interpreting seem to have neglected intonation as a significant means of expressing the speaker's intended message and attitude in the courtroom, and how the interpreter's into national variations may influence the pragmatics of courtroom discourse. Using videos of four authentic interpreter-mediated Chinese court hearings as data, this study investigates the pragmatic functions of intonation in the Chinese questions and the extent to which they are relayed into English for non–Chinese-speaking defendants. Specifically, it aims to identify and compare the foci of Chinese courtroom questions and their interpretations by analysing prosodic features, such as pitch, duration and intensity with the assistance of Praat, a phonetic analysis software. Through a combination of acoustic method and discourse analysis, this study identified four major types of pragmatic functions of intonation in the courtroom setting, namely, interrogating, emphasising, topic-shifting and ridiculing. Deviations of pragmatic force in the interpretation have been observed in the data. The findings of this chapter highlight the complexity of court interpreting and the potential impact of court interpreting on legal proceedings.