The Texture Of English Legislative Discourse Through Functional Discourse Analysis

Legal English discourse has become a topic of interest among linguists and other social scientists since the 1970s. It is relatively common to analyze the features of legislative discourse in perspective of morphology, syntax and grammar in most papers of recent years. This paper, however, tries to explore legislative discourse from a new angle—functional grammar, aiming at introducing the theory into the orientation of discourse analysis.Since the 1950s, discourse analysis has become an independent subject in the field of linguistics. What the traditional grammar and the structural grammar together with the transformational generative grammar study is limited to the level of sentence and its components. However, it would be difficult to define language units'communicative functions if there were no concrete contexts and occasions. More and more linguists have realized that language study should not be confined at the sentence level. It must go beyond the sentence bounds and study the functions of sentence groups and paragraphs in discourse. The founder of systemic functional grammar Halliday states very clearly in his An Introduction to Functional Grammar (2001) that"The aim has been to construct a grammar for purposes of text analysis". It is proved that systemic functional grammar is a more applicable and practicable theory for discourse analysis, and we call this approach of discourse analysis as functional discourse analysis.The novelty of this paper lies in the unique perspective of theoretical system of functional grammar based on the metafunctions and legal register, and the author especially adopts the cohesion model developed by Halliday and Hasan, which mainly includes such devices as reference, substitution and ellipsis, conjunction, and lexical cohesion, to give a full-scale analysis on the texture of English legislative discourse. Anyhow, a proper understanding of the texture of English legislative discourse is significant to social scientists in the field of language and that of law, for they might improve the quality of their work, and enrich the discourse analysis theory as well.There are altogether five parts in this paper. The first part presents a brief introduction to the topic and the present study. Chapter One is literature review. In this part, the historical review and the present study of discourse analysis and text linguistics go first. Within this sub-part, some terms such as discourse, text, texture and linguistic studies of legislative discourse are introduced. Chapter Two is the expatiation of the theoretical framework—the model of the functional approach. It deals with the theory of metafunctions, register analysis, especially cohesion and cohesive devices proposed by Halliday and Hasan. Chapter Three gives a detailed analysis on the texture of legislative discourse with the mentioned theory as well as some statistical analysis. Chapter Four presents the conclusion of the present study. It not only sums up the theoretical as well as practical contributions of the present study, but also comes up with the limitation of the present study and some problems unsolved at present as well.