Field relations in lawyers’ courtroom discourse: Understanding fact construction

Facts of legal cases are formulated in courtroom interactions, where lawyers ground their factual propositions in admissible evidence by construing legal elements and real-world realities. Field is a contextual variable realising ideational meanings through construing phenomena of activities, items, and their properties. Analysing field elements in case facts manifests the internal relations of phenomena, enabling judges to identify key elements in the grounds of lawyers’ reasoning and their logical relations to legal claims. Drawing on the FIELD system from Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and the ideational dimension of the court trial register, this paper proposes a theoretical framework to analyse how lawyers in China’s court trials (particularly civil contract dispute trials) construe case facts through field elements and their interrelations. The findings reveal that lawyers construe different types of field elements and their interrelations to explain the fundamental attributes of evidence: authenticity, relevance, and legality. These field elements distinguish between everyday realities and legally significant facts. By construing case facts through field elements and their interrelations, lawyers could improve the technicality and rationality of trial examination, thereby offering courts or judges key elements to adjudicate facts and promote the efficiency and judicial justice of verdicts.