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The recurrent court-related mediation discourse studies have focused on mediation participants’ willingness. Drawing on a corpus of five situated recorded court-related civil mediation data in China, this article takes one of the frequently-used mediation resources ‘ I don’t want X/Y’ (here X, Y stands for a certain mediation willingness/intention) as a case study of formulating mediation ‘wants’. It is intended to explore mediation participants’ exploitation of the court-related mediation resources to express their mediation willingness/ intentions: how the mediator manipulates either side of the participants’ mediation discursive concepts; how the mediator shift the trajectory of narrating the participants’ mediation dispute-facts to judging on the dispute-facts; and how the mediator deviates himself from the third-party neutral mediators’ mediating role. The value of analyzing this formulation ‘ I don’t want X/Y’ is to reveal the fact that such mediation practices in their recurrent environments might go against the court-related mediation principles such as being self-willingness, neutrality and uprightness. This article contributes to formulate mediation ‘wants’ strategically and promote the court-related mediation practices in the service of sequentially unfolding mediation interaction effectively.

Court-related mediation is proceeded by verbal negotiation to shorten the distance of both parties involved for the final fulfillment of dispute resolution and social harmony. Based on the transcribed mediation data on a workplace injury pretrial case, and from the perspective of Proximization Theory and Spatial-Temporal-Axiological (STA for short) model, this study investigates quantitatively and qualitatively how the mediator arbitrates in terms of spatial, temporal, and axiological proximization. During court-related mediation, the mediator intends to stimulate both sides’ desires to mediate the negotiable space, proximize the mediating discourse and finally achieve persuasive functions of the mediator’s discourse; the mediator’s manipulation of the spatial, temporal, and axiological proximization strategies is of decreasing frequency. Among them, the spatial proximization strategies as dominant roles while the temporal and the axiological proximization ones as auxiliary roles, jointly promote the construction of “mediating space” and establish the legitimized forces in mediation discourse. This study aims at exploring how to achieve the dispute resolution by court-related mediation, total conciliation of conflicts as well as full construction of social harmony.

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