A Study On Chinese Legislative Discourse From The Perspective Of Engagement

In the past thirty years, forensic linguistic research has developed rapidly and our understanding of various kinds of legal language is becoming deeper. In terms of legislative language, the majority of scholars stick to traditional rhetorical research pattern and conduct their researches from the perspective of semantics and figure of speech, lacking systematic research on its interpersonal meaning. For this reason, this study manages to adopt engagement system in the appraisal theory to discover various relationships between legislators and their legal audience by exploring the interpersonal meaning of those engagement resources in the selected corpus.The corpus of this study consists of three Chinese laws, including CLPRC,CPLPRC and PLPRC. Those three laws are typical examples of Chinese laws in terms of their legal contents and language forms. For convenience, this study makes use of the framework of engagement system provided in the UAM Corpus Tool 3.0 to recognize, categorize and annotate engagement resources. Based on the data attained,this study explores legislators' dialogistic stances deeply by analyzing the features of usage and interpersonal meaning of those engagement resources found in the corpus.In order to fulfill this purpose, this study will answer the following three questions:(1) What are the distributional features of engagement resources in CLD?(2) What are the dialogistic stances carried by those engagement resources?(3) What causes legislators to shift dialogistic stances properly?The detailed results of this study are as follows:In terms of the distributional features of engagement resources in CLD, they display unique features in category, frequency of use and linguistic realizations.Firstly, both monogloss and heterogloss appear in the corpus, and the latter is realized by entertain, attribute, deny and counter. Secondly, the frequencies of those engagement resources are quite different. Monogloss holds an absolute advantage in CLPRC while entertain in heteroglossic resources is dominant in the rest two laws.Thirdly, most engagement resources in CLD have their exclusive linguistic realizations.With regard to the interpersonal meaning of those engagement resources,monogloss means the refusal of negotiation and legislators mainly choose this strategy to state basic legislative principles and general regulations. Among all heteroglossicresources, entertain can embody legislator's active negotiating stance fully. The use of attribute in CLD aims at making sure that similar conditions will result in the same consequence, which thus keeps law fair and square. Deny and counter object to basic legal spirit because of their negative and indirect speaking way and thus occur less frequently.As to legislators' dialogistic stances, they are willing to negotiate with judicial members mostly, followed by common citizens, but rarely leave any dialogistic space for criminals. Hence, it can be seen that the choice of dialogistic stance is closely related to the power and position of those legal audience, explaining the inequality of power in legislative discourse further.This thesis discusses various dialogistic relationships between legislators and legal audience from the point view of engagement. Therefore, it provides a new perspective to explain the uniqueness of CLD as well as makes a little contribution to the multi-perspective understanding of CLD.