A Narrative Study On Legal News Text

This dissertation based on the theories of linguistics, journalism and law analyzes the structural forms and social functions of legal news reports and discloses the cognitive mechanism of constructing and understanding legal news texts from the perspective of stylistics and narratologies with the expectation of enriching discourse researches. Legal news reports can be divided into two types. One is called legal system news which mainly reports the creation, revision or repeal of legislation and administrative regulations in China. The other is called case news which mainly reports lawsuits and their judgments by court. Legal news texts report to the public information about the legal system building and culture of rule by law, which has a great effect on establishing society ruled by law. Few studies have been made on legal news texts, let alone studies on it from the perspective of stylistics and narratologies theories combined. The dissertation takes the initiative to plow the field of legal new texts.The dissertation has reached some creative conclusions as follows.A) It opens a new way to study legal news texts. The dissertation mainly based on stylistics and narratologies studies on linguistic styles, text structural forms, narrative technologies and models of legal news reports from influential newspaper, magazine and internet, which helps disclose the constructing and understanding legal news texts in China.B) It builds a corpus of legal news texts. The dissertation collects and builds its own corpus of legal news about legal system building and lawsuits which include 455 texts of ten years from 2000 to 2010 from influential newspapers, magazines, and websites in China. The dissertation draws all its conclusions based on analysis of its corpus of legal news. C) It draws some new research results. The dissertation puts forward the concept of implied narrative, sets up three text structural forms of"title + body + coda", of"central text + nuclear texts"and of"hypertext hyperlink", and what's more, constructs the narrative model of legal news reports in China. The dissertation is divided into seven chapters, each with the main points as follows.Chapter 1 defines legal news texts, which reports legal events that happened or has been discovered recently and summarizes the recent researches home and abroad.Chapter 2 analyzes five forms of legal news title that include"place name + person name","place name + generic reference","status/title +(person name or generic reference)","place + title +(person name)","xx +案/事件/门"and so on. Legal news has three types of double news title that include"sentence + sentence","one sentence","phrase + phrase".Chapter 3 analyzes news body's structural forms and its stylistics. Chapter 4 analyzes narrative technologies and models of legal news texts. The narrative skills of voice, focus, and time and space are discovered applied in legal news reports. The implied narrator hides himself between lines of legal news texts.Chapter 5 discusses the functions of legal news reports. Chapter 6 explores the constructing and understanding legal news reports. Chapter 7 summarizes the dissertation by pointing out its strong and weak points and further research.