A Contrastive Study Of Syntactic Iconicity In English And Chinese Judicial Judgments

Nowadays,the reformation of the writing system of the judicial document is a hot issue.As one of the commonly used legal texts,the language in judicial judgment writing is also attracting more attention.Iconicity theory holds that there is a motivated relationship between the form and the content of language signs,which can provide a new theoretical perspective for the study of the motivation of language in judgments.Based on the syntactic iconicity of cognitive linguistics,this thesis makes a contrastive analysis of the sentences in English and Chinese judgments.The purpose of this paper is to find out the mapping relation between the sentence structure and human cognition in the language of English and Chinese judgments and to explore the similarities and differences at the syntactic level.Qualitative analysis and contrastive analysis are adopted in this paper.This thesis shows that:(1)the sentence structure of English and Chinese judgments is not completely arbitrary and there is a mapping relationship between the sentence structure and the empirical structure of human beings.At the sentence level,order iconicity,distance iconicity,quantity iconicity and markedness iconicity are used in both English and Chinese judgments to enhance the readability,rigor and persuasiveness of the language;(2)according to the principle of syntactic iconicity,there are both similarities and differences between the sentence structures in judgments of English and Chinese.Compared with English judgments,the iconicity principles used in Chinese judgments are relatively simple.Through the contrastive analysis in this paper,the results of this thesis are conducive to deepening the understanding of the similarities and differences between English and Chinese legal texts.Furthermore,this thesis has a certain enlightening effect on the translation strategies of legal texts.