Abstract

Interest contention constitutes the major concern of both conflicting litigants in the courtroom discourses concerning business dispute settlement. This paper, by analyzing the features of discourse information units, studies how the discourse information functions work in the interest contention of courtroom trials concerning business dispute settlement. The present study shows that discourse information functions in interest contention of business dispute settlement can be classified into four types. Based on the previous studies concerning discourse information functions (Du, 2009), the present study finds out another new type of discourse information function, namely, the compound category. Moreover, it can be found that the realization of different discourse information functions rely on the use of different information units in the interest contention of the disputing litigants.

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