| The court judgment is based on the reasonable interpretation of legislative intent in the judicial process, and reflects the process and details of the case trial. It records the action and trend of different parties concerning with accusing and defense in the lawsuit, and also the logic of judge to resolve social conflicts. People usually understand the judicial trial and acquire the concept of legal justice from the case of judgment, therefore, the court judgment with reasonable evidentiality could strengthen the confidence of litigious parties and the public to the justice and rationality of the court activities, and help to promote the development of judicial work. At present, the researches at home and abroad on the court judgment mainly explore the practical problems in the judicial practice from the perspective of jurisprudence, in order to provide references for the reform of judgment documents. Linguistic studies on the court judgment are mainly concerned with its language characteristics, discourse construction, rhetoric argumentation, system function and pragmatic behavior etc., and there are also some researches in sociology and literature. Overall, the current studies mostly focus on qualitative analysis with insufficient number of corpus support, and neglect the recognition and acceptance of the litigious parties, legal practitioners and social public to the court judgment. In addition, along with the return of Hongkong and Taiwan, there are "one country two systems three legal institutions and four regions" between the two sides of Taiwan Strait. The comparative study of court judgment in four regions helps to promote the exchange of Mainland's continental legal system and Hongkong's case law system, and strengthen the communication with Mainland, Macao and Taiwan in the field of judgment documents. The exchanging of jurisprudence and linguistics between the two sides of Taiwan Straits promotes the social harmony and peace as well as the unity of the country.Firstly, the thesis collects 116 cases of court judgment of the highest and local people's court from Hong Kong, Taiwan, Macau and Mainland, and establishes a "cross-strait court judgment corpus" with 174 million words arranged and labeled. Secondly, based on Chafe's evidentiality mode in 1986 and goal relationship theory of Goal Principle, the goal-driven evidentiality mode of verdict discourse is developed and revised according to the actual characteristics of the court judgment. Thirdly, the paper makes a systematic description and quantitative statistics to the components and types of evidentials which convey the information sources, language forms, evidential function and reliability of the cross-strait court judgments, and then comparatively analyses the statistical results as well as theoretical interpretation. Finally, SPSS software is used for correlation analysis of the statistical data, in order to prove the effectiveness of the goal-driven evidentiality mode, and theoretical interpretation of goal relationship is combined with case examples to explain the data dependence. On the basis of above studies, the thesis summarizes the similarities and differences of evidential construction in the cross-strait court judgment discourses, which provides reference and suggestions for the writing practice and reform of the judicial adjudicative documents, and also the limitations and shortcomings of this paper are considered for the future research and ideas.The main conclusions of the research are as follows:1. There are four types of information source in court judgments conveying evidentiality:the cultural beliefs, sensory experience, hearsay and inference.1) The court judgments of Mainland, Macau and Taiwan, which all belong to the continental law system, use the highest rate of evidential information sources of cultural belief, however, the Hong Kong's verdicts of case law system use the evidential information sources of inference at most.2) For evidential information sources of inference, the court judgments in four regions all emphasize the causal reasoning, with less conditional reasoning, and Hong Kong and Macau's verdicts are obviously stronger in the argumentation than Mainland and Taiwan's.3) There are more diverse types of the evidential information sources of sensory experience in Hong Kong and Macao's verdicts.4) Mainland, Hong Kong and Taiwan's court judgments use more evidential information sources of hearsay than Macao's.2. Evidential information sources have a double-layered structural mode of reliability:1) The evidential information source of cultural belief is more credible than that of sensory experience, while that of hearsay is the least. However, the evidential information source of inference is based on other three types of information sources processed with reasoning, thus the inference based on cultural beliefs is more authentic than that based on sensory experience, while that based on hearsay is the least in reliability.2) There is also a gap of degree between the two levels of the reliability, while cultural belief is more believable than the inference based on cultural beliefs in reliability, and also sensory experience is better than that based on sensory experience, as well as hearsay.3. The language forms of evidentiality are divided as words, phrases and compound sentence:1) the court judgments in four regions use "the third information source subject+verb" structure and adverbs of medium degree in reliability mostly, but Macau's verdicts significantly use "the first information source subject+ verb" structure more than others', and there are more adverbs of high degree in reliability in Hong Kong and Macau's verdicts than that of Mainland and Taiwan's.2) Mainland, Hong Kong and Taiwan's court judgments mainly use prepositional phrases to convey evidential meaning, while Macao's verdicts with verb-object phrases.3) The court judgments in all areas mostly use causal compound sentences to transfer the evidentiality.4. The reliability level of evidential word is that:1) "the first information source subject + verb" structure is stronger than that of the third subject, and "the undefined information source subject+ verb" structure is the least in reliability, while there are also reliability gap of the different verb collocations in the same level of information source subject.2) Adverbs of high degree in reliability provide more supports to the court judgments than that of medium degree, and that of low degree do the least.3) Prepositional phrases and verb-object phrases in the court judgments often mark the evidential information source of cultural belief and that of inference based on cultural beliefs, thus they also has the higher reliability level.4) Causal compound sentence is stronger than conditional clause in reliability support for the verdicts, since the reliability level is determined by the types of information source on which compound sentence is based.5. There are four evidential functions of the verdicts:citing to support, depicting to induce, reporting to remove responsibility, and reasoning to summarize.1) The court judgments in four regions use the evidential function of citing to support in a maximum frequency, and averagely Macau's verdict do the most.2) The evidential function of depicting to induce is used the least frequently in all the court judgments.3) Hong Kong and Mainland's verdicts significantly use the evidential function of reporting to remove responsibility more frequently than Macao and Taiwan's, in order to reduce and separate the legal and practical responsibilities of the information given by the verdicts.4) The cross-strait court judgments are divided into three levels according to the using frequency of the evidential function of reasoning to summarize, then Macau's verdicts obviously keep in high frequency area, and Hong Kong and Taiwan's are in the medium region, while Mainland only in the low region, which clearly reflects the insufficiency of argumentation in Mainland's court judgments.6. The reliability level of evidential function is that:1) The function of citing to support is based on the evidential information source of cultural belief, which is more reliable and certain than the direct experience with objectivity, authority and stability, thus it has the highest level in reliability.2) The evidential function of depicting to induce is based on the "direct experience" follows behind closely in reliability.3) Next one is the evidential function of reasoning to summarize which is based on the "indirect experience", since it assumes a strong legal and real responsibility, and also undertakes a high degree of reliability support.4) The evidential function of reporting to remove responsibility is also based on "indirect experience", which explicitly represents that the information provided in the court judgments is reported from others, in order to reduce and separate the legal and practical responsibilities. As a result, this function bears the minimum responsibility of reliability support in the court judgments.7. The language form of the court judgments is made up according to the different types of information sources as the background knowledge, and selecting and using different words, phrases and sentences depends on the different types of information sources and discourse expectations, which means language forms are determined by the integration of the information sources, thus there is a goal relationship of integration between them. The correlation coefficient of the corpus data displays the practical connection between different types of information sources and the language forms of evidentiality. Evidential information sources provide support for the evidential functions, and on the other hand, evidential functions carry the actual performance of the information sources and language form. According to the different types of information sources, the verdict discourse realizes all functions of evidentiality. Therefore, there is a goal relationship of support between them. The correlation coefficient of the corpus data displays the practical connection between different types of information sources and the functions of evidentiality. Constructing the textual reliability of the court judgments is the primary purpose of the information sources, language forms an&-functions of evidentiality, and the information sources directly indicate the opinion and attitude of the verdicts to the authenticity and certainty of information. According to the different types of information sources, evidential meaning could obtain different degrees of reliability support. Consequently the reliability degree of evidentiality in the court judgments depends on the description and clarification for the information sources, thus there is a goal relationship of clarification between them. Altogether, the goal relationship of integration, support and clarification run through the construction of discourse evidentiality mode in the court judgments, gradually showing with a goal-driven situation.This dissertation contributes to the field of study in many aspects, including:1) A cross-strait court judgment corpus is created with the real verdicts of 174 million words through the field survey, on which data-driven research method is employed.2) Goal Principle are critiqued and extended as the holistic theoretical framework for the court judgment discourse study, and a goal-driven mode of evidentiality is proposed according to the actual characteristics of the court judgment.3) The thesis enlarges the researching scope of evidentiality theory, which is helpful for the development of Chinese evidential study.4) The paper opens the new window to the present researching status of the court judgments from the perspective of pragmatics and cognitive linguistics.5) The findings of this study bear implications on the writing and reform of the judicial judgment documents, which serves the judicial practice and education. |
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