An empirical study on court-related mediator’s discourse strategies from the perspective of proximization: Based on a workplace injury pretrial mediation case

Court-related mediation is proceeded by verbal negotiation to shorten the distance of both parties involved for the final fulfillment of dispute resolution and social harmony. Based on the transcribed mediation data on a workplace injury pretrial case, and from the perspective of Proximization Theory and Spatial-Temporal-Axiological (STA for short) model, this study investigates quantitatively and qualitatively how the mediator arbitrates in terms of spatial, temporal, and axiological proximization. During court-related mediation, the mediator intends to stimulate both sides’ desires to mediate the negotiable space, proximize the mediating discourse and finally achieve persuasive functions of the mediator’s discourse; the mediator’s manipulation of the spatial, temporal, and axiological proximization strategies is of decreasing frequency. Among them, the spatial proximization strategies as dominant roles while the temporal and the axiological proximization ones as auxiliary roles, jointly promote the construction of “mediating space” and establish the legitimized forces in mediation discourse. This study aims at exploring how to achieve the dispute resolution by court-related mediation, total conciliation of conflicts as well as full construction of social harmony.