This study examines the pragmatic organization of courtroom discourse in the 5th and 10th witness examinations of Hong Jang-won during the Constitutional Court presidential impeachment trial in South Korea. Drawing on Grice’s Cooperative Principle, the study aims to identify the distribution of maxim non-observance in witness examination discourse and to explain how flouting generates conversational implicatures and strategic discourse functions in an institutional setting. The data consist of 548 question-answer sequences collected from the two hearing sessions. Methodologically, the study adopts a mixed-method design combining descriptive quantitative analysis of maxim violations with qualitative analysis of representative cases. ChatGPT-5.2 and Gemini 3 Pro were used as auxiliary tools for preliminary coding, while final categorization and interpretation were determined through the researcher’s review. The findings show that violations of quantity, quality, and manner were relatively frequent, whereas relevance violations were rare. The results further indicate that maxim non-observance functions not as simple communicative failure but as a strategic resource for credibility management, responsibility negotiation, issue control, and meaning construction in highly institutionalized courtroom discourse.
Gi-Hyun Joh (Thu,) studied this question.