| The South China Sea has numerous natural resources such as natural gas and oil which have been attracted by almost all the countries throughout the Asia-Pacific region. The dispute of the South China Sea is one of the most important current events in China, since maritime rights and interests of China have been constantly infringed, such as, some reefs in Nansha Islands occupied, some areas segmented and the resources plundered. Hence there’re increasing numbers of scholars have tried to solve the controversial problem since the appearance of the dispute from various perspectives such as laws, history, geography, and so forth.This dissertation, focusing on the discourse analysis of the English version of different laws of South China Sea aims to understand why the People’s Republic of China, the Republic of the Philippines, the Socialist Republic of Viet Nam have different interpretations of UNCOLS or other international related laws and the disputes of the South China Sea.Therefore, the paper begins with the introduction of the background of the South China Sea. Then it comes to analyze the past and present study of this dispute from the historical, political, geographical, law and international relationship aspects. In order to make differences among the laws related to South China Sea in China, Philippines, Vietnam and the world, this thesis is written based on the relevant authentic legal texts of the sea from China, Philippine, Vietnam and the world as the data. Meanwhile, there will have a brief introduction of those relevant laws.The main theory used in the thesis is Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), especially Halliday’s Systemic-functional Grammar. Before analyzing the data, the author constructs a small size of English Monolingual Corpora based on the data collected from the authentic legal texts. And the analytic tool is Antconc3.2.1w9and Claws Pos Tagger. Then the results will be analyzed from the lexical perspective and sentence structures based on the corpus.First, by investigating the frequencies of the two key proper names’territorial sea’and’exclusive economic zone’in those collected laws shows that the frequencies of the two proper names in the legal texts in China’s related laws and the international related laws are much higher than them in Philippines and Vietnam, the author adopts the ideational function to analyze the results to show that the texts-producers of the relevant international laws and China’s laws convey the similar information that those two proper names are of great importance. Second, by investigating the collocations of the proper name ’territorial sea’ in the collected legal texts, the results show that the collocations of the proper name’territorial sea’ are related to the definition and limitation of it in the legal texts in China’s related laws and the international related laws. Then the author adopts the interpersonal function to analyze this results to present that China and United Nations convey their attitude towards these the key proper name ’territorial sea’ that they don’t want any disputes over the South China Sea happen. Last, by investigating the lexical density and the average sentence length in the relevant laws in the UNCLOS and in China, Philippines, and Vietnam shows that the lexical density and average sentence length in the legal texts of the laws in Philippines, Vietnam, and the world are higher than in China. Then based on the theory of textual function of Halliday’s Systemic-functional Grammar, the analysis is that the sentences used in UNCLOS are more difficult to understand and the sentences in the relevant law in China are the easiest to understand.Based on the three functions proposed by Halliday, by investigating the overall frequencies of the two proper names, the collocations of the proper name, and the lexical density and average sentence length of the collected legal texts, the author tries to innovate, achieving to provide a better way to understand the causes of the disputes on South China Sea. |
PDF Full Text Request