| Law is very significant for today's society. It regulates people's behavior, adjusts relationships between different classes, and guarantees citizens'rights and a state's stability. Indeed, law has power. Since law is expressed by language, it is apparent that legal language has power. However, the power possessed by legal language is invisible. How does legal language express its power? What is the relationship between legal language and power? In this thesis, these questions will be discussed.Critical Discourse Analysis views the world as an ideological social structure and focuses on studying the reflection of such ideology in the course of language using. Thus, this thesis analyzes legal discourses from the perspective of Critical Discourse Analysis for the purpose of revealing the hidden power in legal language.By employing Fairclough's Three-Dimensional Framework and Halliday's Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG), the author develops the analysis from both micro and macro aspects. Firstly, based on Halliday's SFG, the author describes classification, modality and transitivity in legal discourse, and analyzes how power and ideology hide in it. Then, guided by Fairclough's Three-Dimensional Framework, the author takes both social and historical conditions into consideration to explain the relationship between legal discourses and social structures. Specifically, the author wants to discover how the legal discourses are generated by the social structures and what effects the legal discourses can have on the social structures.The conclusion of the present study is that legal discourse, as a means to adjust social relations and maintain the social order, surly has certain power and ideology. Therefore, legislators and other legal professionals, when making and applying laws, should not only consider the law's authoritativeness and enforceability, but also the endurality of the ruled classes. |
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