A Speech Act Exploration Of Language Legislation In China

Language legislation not only plays a vital role in China's language governance,but also lays the legal basis for language policy studies.Language legislation is not only an explicit language policy but also a legal act of language policy.The most apparent feature of China's language policy is the “subjectivity with diversity,” i.e.,the dominance of the Chinese language and the diversity of minority languages.Integrating quantitative and qualitative approaches,the findings of this study can be summarized in the following three aspects.First,based on the analysis of the language legislation corpus,it is found that Chinese,minority languages,and foreign languages are the objects of regulation in our language legislation.The “subjectivity with diversity” of the language policy includes only Chinese and minority languages,but not foreign languages.It indicates that there is the inconsistency between the “subjectivity with diversity” language policy and the de facto language legislation.Second,through the comparative analysis of the Chinese language legislation corpus and the minority language legislation corpus,it is found that foreign languages are hardly mentioned in the minority language legislation.Thirdly,an exhaustive study of the speech acts that appear in language legislation reveals the percentages of the categories of directives,declaratives,expressives,litigatives,and commisives.Directives take up the highest percentage of speech acts,illustrating the authoritativeness of language legislation.The innovations of this paper are threefold: firstly,this is a corpus-based study of language legislation;such a methodology has not been noticed in the same subject matter(language legislation);secondly,this study goes beyond the quantitative analysis of language legislation to explore the “subjectivity with diversity” in our language legislation;thirdly,speech act theory as a framework provides a new interpretation of language legislation in terms of the “subjectivity with diversity.” The significance of this study is twofold.Firstly,this study,using a self-built corpus,identifies the inconsistency between the connotation of “subjectivity with diversity” language policy and de facto language legislation.Secondly,through speech act analysis,it quantifies the linguistic features of language legislation,which expands the application of speech act theory in legislative discourse analysis.