NEWS & EVENTS

Appliable Linguistics Seminar 21
(Seminar on Language Science and System Science 87)

Time: 16:00, 16 March 2016
Venue: #312, School of Foreign Languages

Speaker: Dr. Susanto Saman
Title: Metafunctional Analysis on the Intonation in Courtroom Discourse
Abstract: In the talk, I will discuss my ongoing research on the spoken language in courtroom discourse. As pointed out in Archer (2006), Gnisci and Bakeman (2007), and Hobbs (2007), spoken language is extensively used by the subjects in the courtroom interaction which is commonly controlled by judges. For my research, I take a case study on a Chinese courtroom. I focus on the description of the intonation system (i.e. Tonality, Tonicity and Tone) and its metafunction by using the theory of Systemic Functional Linguistics (Halliday, 1994; Halliday & Greaves, 2008, Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004; Susanto, 2014). One of its significances is to explain how intonation plays its own role in the exchange structure, i.e. a systemic flowchart for exchange structure (Fawcett, Mije & Wissen, 1988; Martin, 2000) in the courtroom. Further, it may contribute to the generic structure potential (Halliday & Fawcett, 1987; Fawcett & Young, 1988) of the courtroom discourse as genre.