A battlefield or a lecture hall? A contrastive multimodal discourse analysis of courtroom trials

This paper conducts a contrastive multimodal discourse analysis of an American courtroom trial with a Chinese courtroom trial, which falls into the research area of forensic linguistics. The author studies the courtroom trials as multimodal discourse from the perspective of systemic-functional linguistics, centering on the legal actors’ verbal language (speech) and paralanguage (gestures, gaze and bodily movements) in making the kinds of meaning – in SFL terms the trilogy of ideational, interpersonal, and textual meaning in the courtrooms. This study finds that the American courtroom is more like a battlefield with the prosecuting and defense attorneys fighting each other on even ground with the weapons of speech, gestures, gaze and bodily movements, whereas the Chinese courtroom is more like a lecture hall wherein the procurators and the defense lawyers, although seated face-to-face, play their hierarchical part in ‘lecturing’ to the audience with language and gaze. The study reveals the unbalanced relationship between the procurators and the defense lawyers in the Chinese courtroom represented by their multimodal discourse, and sheds some light on further research in this line and gives some implications to the betterment of legal actors’ employment of multimodality.