A Contrastive Study Of Voices In The U.S. Constitution (1787) And The UN Charter

Passive voice, as one of leading features of legal English, has been widely accepted by people and legal English is taken as a general term for all types of legal discourses in English. However through observation, the author found many international conventions in English version employ more active voice. But few people have noticed this phenomenon. This paper tries to make a comparison between voices employed in the national laws and the international conventions, and further analyze the relations between voice and the hidden power and ideology in legal discourse.In this paper, the author collects three pairs of data, each one including one national law and one roughly corresponding international convention, namely, the U.S. Constitution (1787) and the UN Charter, Criminal Law of PRC and Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment of Punishment; and Human Rights Act 1998 UK and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. According to manual count, the results show that the frequency of passive voice in national laws is higher than that in international conventions. But the international conventions are also in the field of legal language, why passive voice is not reflected in it?The author adopts the theoretical framework of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) with the combination of Halliday's Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG) to explain the phenomenon and chooses the first pair as an example to make a detailed analysis.The paper aims at breaking a new ground in the study of the legal language. The discoveries that there exists the lack of high frequency of passive voice in the selected international conventions and that the selection of voice should depend on invisible"power"and"ideology"hidden in legal discourse exemplify once again the rule that linguistic forms depend on linguistic functions and serve the purposes of language. Since legal discourse is such a general term that covers many subfields of discourse concerning law, this discovery will encourage more scholars to do further researches on features of subfields of legal language.