On The Morality Of Judgment Expressions In China From The Ethic-pragmatic Perspective

As an important part of the discourse system of the rule of law,judicial expressions are considered as a vital carrier for the fair and open appearance of judicial trial.Judicial expressions are not only related to the organization and construction of discourse,but also related to the influence and restriction of a series of hidden factors such as judicial justice,moral ethics,and social customs.It has always been the focus of the academic study.Under the background of my country’s comprehensive promotion of the rule of law,the inheritance and spread of Chinese traditional excellent legal culture,and the construction of a civilization of the rule of law in a new era,the in-depth study of judicial expressions based on language ontology and up to cultural jurisprudence has important practical significance as well as positive academic values.The study of judgment expressions mainly belongs to the field of Law,with the themes of criminal law theory and practice,judicial impartiality and applicability of law being explored.The relevant research from the linguistics perspective mainly relates to the language rhetoric and style of judicial expressions,but also involves the topics of politeness,identity,face conflict and so on,which help us to understand the written judgment expressions from different aspects.Judicial expressions not only show the institutional,professional and practical nature of discourse,but also the phenomenon of moral expressions.For example,judges write a postscript to perpetrators in the hope that they would be able to make a change,or use words“积极悔过(actively regret)”,“主动认罪(plead guilty)”,“恶意毁坏(vandalize)”to evaluate their behaviors in judgments.However,the discussion on law and ethics is confined to the field of jurisprudence and legal philosophy,rarely from the linguistic point of view.Besides,it lacks a further inquiry into the relevance of language,law,society and culture and the macro discussion based on the construction of the discourse system of the rule of law.In view of this,this paper intends to describe the morality of judicial expressions and explore the rule of law with virtue and its social effectiveness by taking ethic-pragmatics as the theoretical framework.The author takes 1981-2019 as the timeline,10 years as the time dividing line,randomly selects 30 criminal judgments from the China Referee Instrument Network(https://wenshu.court.gov.cn),builds a total of 120,about 167,600 words of small corpus,uses ethic-pragmatics as the analytical framework,and adopts the combination of quantitative and qualitative methods to describe and analyze characteristics of judgment expressions from moral appraisals and moral voices.By using ICTCLAS2013 and Microsoft Office 2019 as statistical tools,the author makes Chinese wordsplitting statistics and data summary of criminal judgments,supplemented by qualitative research to analyze the morality and the behind reasons of judicial expressions.The study found that:Firstly,moral appraisals spread overall corpus which shows that moral appraisals of judgment expressions are universally used.Secondly,in the distribution of moral appraisals,judges prefer negative moral appraisals to positive moral appraisals.The frequency of standard negative moral appraisals has been decreasing year by year.On the contrary,the number of positive moral appraisals has been slowly increasing year by year.Moral appraisals are mainly composed of behavior verbs,adjectives,and adverbs to describe defendants’ behaviors.Among them,negative moral appraisals are mainly action verbs,but positive moral appraisals are mainly adjectives and adverbs.They differ a lot to the choice of speech.Thirdly,in the distribution of moral voices,the intervention of moral voices is led by the trial party,followed by the prosecution,the defense,and third-party.Fourthly,as far as the relation between moral appraisals and types of crimes is concerned,judges tend to use negative moral appraisals under crimes of endangering national security,public safety,civil rights,socialist market economic order and malfeasance.Judgment expressions tend to be a combination of both negative and positive moral appraisals in cases involving crimes of disrupting social management order,crimes of infringing property and corruption.In terms of the relation between moral voices and types of crimes,the trial party is more involved in crimes of infringement of civil rights and democratic rights,crimes of disrupting the socialist market order,and crimes of infringement of property and crimes of corruption and acceptance of bribe.The defense is mainly involved in crimes of infringement of civil rights and democratic rights and crimes of infringing property and crimes of disrupting the socialist market economy order.The intervention of the prosecution and the third party is relatively small,mainly involved in crimes of infringement of civil rights and democratic rights.This study holds that: firstly,the overall characteristics of moral expressions reflect the ethical and temporal nature of judicial expressions.Secondly,the high frequency of negative moral appraisals reflects judges’ anger at criminal acts of the parties,negative legal and social effects of the case,and the strengthening of judicial authority.The slow growth trend of positive moral appraisals reflects judges’ recognition of the parties’ active compensation and voluntary guilty plea,and reflects the humane aspect of the rule of law in the new era.Thirdly,the intervention of the subject of moral voices indicates that all social classes have the opportunity to speak out,which embodies the procedural justice.Fourthly,defendants’ crimes are different and the degree of harm is different under different crimes,which will inevitably lead to some differences in the use of moral expressions for a judicial decision.The high frequency of moral expressions in crime of violating civil and democratic rights reflects the requirement of the law to protect the rights of citizens and is in agreement with the goal of building the rule of law.This paper describes manifestations of moral expressions in different dimensions from the ethic-pragmatic perspective,and makes in-depth discussions on the internal mechanisms and motivations of legal construction,the rule of law civilization and social development behind it.Different from the traditional disciplinary research into judicial expressions,the thesis provides a new perspective based on the language ontology,and an applicable method for the study of ethic-pragmatics in other texts.The results of the study have certain enlightening effects on us to further understand judicial expressions,to balance the discursive effectiveness of “law” and “morality” in the judicial field,to improve the meta-lingual consciousness of judicial expressions,and to help the language practice of “the rule of law” in the new era.