24 February 2021

Discourse studies on Chinese civil trials based on CLIPS corpus

Yunfeng Ge & Hong Wang (Shandong Normal University)

The courtroom is an arena where language, social variables, and dynamic elements of legal process are correlated with each other to produce a diversity of discourses. The discourse studies on Chinese civil trials are aimed at description of interest appeal, interpretation of interest negotiation, and explanation of resolution of conflict of interest. These studies correspond to three different discourse spaces: textual space, socio-pragmatic space, and social-cultural space, where discourse is regarded as text, knowledge, and social practice respectively. The studies are based on CLIPS (Corpus for the Legal Information Processing System), consisting of transcriptions of Chinese civil court hearings of 926 cases which are annotated with the help of DITagging developed by the authors based on Discourse Information Theory.