Discourse of Law: Analysis of Cooperative Principles and Speech Acts in Iranian Law Courts

Abstract

Judgment is closely connected with language, its questioning, answering, meaning and interpretation. Forensic linguistics for its application in real life and for its involvement in the field that is capable of influencing the course of one’s life has become a very interesting and pragmatic discipline to study; however, one that is still not very widespread in the Iran academic setting. This paper aims at providing an insight of how language operates in the legal setting by building bridges between cooperative principles and speech acts in forensic linguistics. This study is an initial attempt to investigate the relationship between violation of Gricean quantity maxim by more than 50 defendants (half of the cases incriminated and half of them acquitted) in relation to different speech acts which are used by interrogators in criminal courts. This study is based primarily on written and terminated documents from judiciary files. Data for this study is collected through Iran's judicial courts. This study aims to show how maxim of quantity is violated in criminal cases (incriminated or acquitted) in relation to different speech acts. The analysis shows that quantity maxims’ violation has correlation with criminal convictions in relation to different speech acts. Keywords: Judgment, Forensic Linguistics, Discourse of Law, Cooperative Principles, Speech Acts, Criminal Conviction and Acquittal.