City University of Hong Kong Dep
Department of Chinese, Translation and Linguistics
Research Seminar
Implicatures in Jury Instructions
Presented by
Mr. CHENG Le
PhD candidate at Department of Chinese, Translation and Linguistics
City University of Hong Kong
Date: 11 August 2008, Monday
Time: 4:30pm - 6:00pm
Venue: B7516 (Lift 3, 7/F, Blue Zone),Academic Building,CityU
Abstract
The previous studies on jury instruction are limited to the legalese, such the lexical and syntactic features of jury instruction. There are, however, no comparable scholarships discussing jury instructions from pragmatic and discursive perspective. To fill in the gap, this study, mainly drawing on the authentic court judgments from Hong Kong Judiciary, aims to demonstrate why Gricean Cooperative Principles are expected to be observed when the judges are delivering their instructions to the jury, and that the violation of the four maxims usually constitutes a ground for appeal and therefore the suspension or quash of a conviction, or the retrial of a case.
Speaker
Mr. CHENG Le is a PhD candidate at Department of Chinese, Translation and Linguistics, City University of Hong Kong. He graduated from Foreign Languages School, China University of Political Sciences and Law, received his Masters degree in law at Southwest University of Political Sciences and Law, his Masters degree in English linguistics at Zhejiang University and passed the Bar examination of the PRC. He is interested in the discourse analysis of legal documents.
