The last word before the bench of power: a corpus-assisted attitudinal analysis of defendants’ final statements in Chinese criminal courts

Drawing on Appraisal Theory and a corpus-assisted analysis of 336 defendants’ final statements (DFSs) in Chinese criminal courts, this article examines how defendants deploy attitudinal resources to construct evaluative stances and how such deployment varies with socio-demographic factors. Judgment, Affect, and Appreciation form a pyramid-shaped distributional structure, within which five recurrent attitudinal patterns are identified: Cathartic Remorse, Penitential Narration, Mitigating Attribution, Structured Advocacy, and Minimal Articulation. Attitudinal resource deployment also differs across gender, education, and plea stance: female defendants show a distinct profile of distress and negative self-positioning; educational groups differ in the occurrence of several attitudinal resources and evaluative orientations; and plea stance corresponds to distinct evaluative configurations oriented toward contestation, selective negotiation, and compliance. Theoretically, the study extends the Appraisal Framework by incorporating legality within Judgment and orientation as an additional analytical parameter, enhancing its applicability to power-asymmetrical institutional discourse. Practically, the findings highlight uneven patterns of evaluative participation in courtroom interaction and point to the need for institutional safeguards that can support more substantive participation in DFS.