Critical Discourse Analysis of Judicial Conversations in Vietnam: A Case Study

Abstract

This article analyzed the interrogation conversation between the jury members and the defendant in a criminal trial in Vietnam. The examined corpus consisted of four conversations with a capacity of about 43 minutes during the interrogation at a criminal trial in Vietnam. Content description and discourse analysis are used as methods from a qualitative approach to explore how power was exercised, maintained, and legitimized in Vietnamese legal conversational discourses. The research results showed that there were seven ways of expression conducted by the jury to produce power in conversation. Specifically, they were the obligation to use polite words/phrases in the defendant's responses, the obligation of the defendants to answer the juris in a question-answer pair, the phenomenon of interruption, the right to change the subject of the conversation, the Trial Panel’s request to take action of the defendants, the questions not for informational purposes, the phenomenon of omitting the subject during questioning.