Justice Must Be Seen To Be Done: An SFL Approach To Discourse Analysis Of News Reports On Innocence Cases

Recent years have witnessed several wrongly convicted innocence cases being retried and innocent people being exonerated in the background of legal reforms in China.The reporting of these cases gave rise to massive impacts on society and drew continuous attention from social actors.This thesis analyzes English news reporting on three innocence cases in China,Huugjilt case,Chen Man case and Nie Shubin case,from the perspectives of instantiation and individuation in Systemic Functional Linguistics.With the methodology of qualitative study and the assistance of corpus tool,the analyses reveal the linguistic features of English news reporting on innocence cases and how news reporting affiliates more foreign readers to let them see justice to be done,and publicizes the legal ideologies and progress in China.The analyses find out that in the context of legal news,English news reports on innocence cases employ the coupling of interpersonal and ideational meaning along the cline of instantiation to express attitude and take stances.In terms of the main participants of ‘court' and ‘victims',firstly,the discourse establishes the action and credibility of the judicial authority through coupling of relational/material process and appreciation/judgement in appraisal system.Secondly,the victims and their family's living states and emotional changes are demonstrated by coupling of behavioral/material process and affect.In individuation and affiliation analysis,on one hand,the legal culture in China distributes social resources to newspapers,giving access to provide platform for participants to make voices.On the other hand,newspapers mobilize resources to create bonds and construct shared identities of ‘justice witnesses' and ‘potential victims' to affiliate with readers.The news reporting allows readers to understand the legal process in Chinese legal culture.Furthermore,newspapers influence their feelings,values and attitudes towards Chinese judicial institutions and the victims,which makes the foreign readers comprehend the significant impacts these cases have on Chinese legal systems.Moreover,the instantiation and individuation features reflected in English news reporting have some inspiration of effective legal publicity to foreign countries about the legal progress and ideologies of procedural justice and ‘presumption of innocence' in Chinese legal system.