Analysis of court conversations based on the pragmatic markers of politeness and impoliteness

Along with the progress of the judicial system, the language of the court and the way of speaking in legal contexts have also been accompanied by changes and developments. This new linguistic field provides a valuable platform for examining linguistic theories and their adaptability in the field of law. In this regard, this article aims to compare the politeness and impoliteness markers of Brown and Levinson (1987) and Culpepper (1996) theories in the conversations of judges and defendants and determines the appearance of these markers and degree of following and violating regarding these variables by these two judicial groups. For this purpose, 15 video files related to the public sessions of the Iranian criminal courts were taken from the Aparat website as a available sampling, and after transcription, they were subjected to quantitative and qualitative analysis. The results of descriptive and inferential statistics show that judges and defendants have the highest frequency in the "following of social distance" marker in the formation of polite words. Also, regarding the violation of the principles of politeness, it was found that the marker of "non-following of negative politeness" had the highest frequency in the conversations of the judges, and the marker of "non-following of power relations" had the highest frequency in the words of the defendants. In addition, the results show that the judges have a significant difference with the defendants in respect of other markers, except for the "following of positive politeness" marker. The defendants also have significant differences with the judges in violating all the markers. The reason why most judges adhere to the principle of politeness can be related to the issue of keeping face and power.