The present study concentrates on pragmatic vagueness as a strategy in Chinese courtroom response.

Based on Prince\'s classification of hedges,this paper explores English hedges in courtroom answers and their conversational implicature,with an aim to illustrate that hedges play a very important role in courtroom answers: they can bring about various conversational implicatures and thus affect the results of the courtroom inquiries.

The present study, which adopts Critical Discourse Analysis, the Cooperative Principle and the Principle of Goal Analysis as its analytic approaches, analyzes Saddam Hussein’s courtroom responses in his trial (from October 19, 2005 to December 31, 2006).

Based on relevant theories of presupposition,the paper aims to study the linguistic features of courtroom interaction and endeavors to show how presupposition is realized in courtroom interaction and how a favorable effect is made for parties in a trial.

Speech act is the philosophical starting point of all linguistic phenomena including courtroom discourse,which is made up of a clustering of various speech acts and is highly extemporaneous,interactive and dynamic as a functional register of institutional discourse.

Recently the study of courtroom discourse has been the focus of forensic linguistics.

At present, the research on the legal language in our country is mostly concentrated on the static description, studying the legal language itself from the syntax or semantic angle, but lack the dynamic study, let alone the study and research on the combination of pragmatic theories and courtroom discourse.