A Study Of The Reasoning Achievement In Arbitration Award

Arbitration award, confirmation and judgment of the procedure and the entity of the law case based on arbitration principles during or after the arbitration process, is a legal arbitration document. With the perfection of law and regulations, the writing of legal instruments is growing increasingly professional. As a special genre, arbitration award has its own unique language characteristics. As the core of arbitration award, the reasoning process is targeted at illustrating Tribunal Comments in line of law fact, law and its reasons of inducing the final verdict. Among the seven parts in arbitration award, Confirming Facts of the Case and Tribunal Comments serve as the main body as well as demonstrate the reasoning process of arbitration award. Through literature review, although study on arbitration award from linguistics is increasingly rich, research on the reasoning process from discourse is insufficient. Therefore, this study adopts it as the research subject.Based on the above, this paper attempts to analyze Confirming Facts of the Case and Tribunal Comments which demonstrate the reasoning process systematically from the angle of cohesion in systematic functional grammar, aiming at figuring out these three questions:(1) what are the general cohesive characteristics in the reasoning process?(2) what are the cohesive characteristics in Confirming Facts of the Case and Tribunal Comments respectively ?(3) how do the cohesive devices facilitate the reasoning achievement of arbitration award?This paper has collected 80 original Chinese arbitration awards to establish a small corpus. In the next, the author encodes and labels the Confirming Facts of the Case and Tribunal Comments from the layer of implicit and explicit cohesion, with the help of UAM corpus tool and AntConc. Then, the author uses the combination of quantitative and qualitative method and corpus-based method to analyze the data got from the research. In the end, the author uses the data to analyze the features of the reasoning process.Through the tagging, analysis and conclusion of the real corpus, this research finds out:Firstly, cohesion is not only the main mean of constructing the discourse, but also shows unique features in the specific genre of arbitration award. In these two parts, explicit cohesive device show its diversities. While, implicit cohesive device takes a dominating position throughout the whole reasoning process.Secondly, the emphasis of various cohesive devices in explicit and implicit cohesion is relatively different. In Confirming Facts of the Case, substitution, continuity and supposition are used more frequently than other explicit cohesive devices. In terms of implicit cohesive devices, continuous TP pattern accounts for the biggest part. Compared with Confirming Facts of the Case, Tribunal Comments prefer ellipsis, causal relationship and transition, with the same theme pattern as the main implicit cohesive device. This lies in the fact that different parts of the arbitration awards convey different corresponding rhetorical functions and communicative purposes.Thirdly, reasoning is a strict logic process which needs kinds of cohesive devices to fulfill the logic relationship. Different cohesive devices facilitate different logic relationships, which propel the development of the reasoning process. For instance, the transition emerges more frequently in Tribunal Comments than in Confirming Facts of the Case. This is because that the conflicts of the law case are mainly reflected and concentrated in Tribunal Comments. Both of the two parts need to employ different cohesive devices to achieve different logic relationships, to better serve the whole logic development of the discourse.Overall, it is obvious that cohesion plays an essential role in the forming of the logic of the discourse. Different logic relationships need different cohesive devices to fulfill. The distributional characteristics of cohesion vary between Confirming Facts of the Case and Tribunal Comments. Therefore, in the writing of arbitration award, the arbitrator needs to master the logic development of arbitration award to use appropriate cohesive devices to present the whole reasoning procedure. This way of writing can help the readers understand the law fact and the reasons of the verdict efficiently and normalize the writing of arbitration award.