| In daily transnational political,economic and cultural exchanges,language carries the information for communications.Legal language is playing an increasingly important role.Whether it is political or commercial activities,laws and regulations have the role of regulating and guiding each participant.In cross-border cultural exchanges,the role of law is particularly prominent.But languages and scripts vary from country to country,and official English translations provide the necessary conditions for cross-jurisdictional cultural exchange.Understanding the similarities and differences of legal languages in different countries will help us understand and implement their legal provisions,and it will also help different countries learn from each other in the formulation and implementation of laws.Among the legal discourses,judicial discourse is one of the most important legal documents both in legal practice and legal communications.Supreme court opinions exist in almost every jurisdiction.Previous studies about judicial discourse analysis focus on semantic or pragmatic view.In order to view language discourse in a more refined way,scholars have proposed the method of local grammar description.However,to make meaning,grammar has to be combined with semantics.Therefore,the present paper adopts a form-meaning perspective to explore the characteristics of local grammar patterns in China and US supreme court opinions,and analyze the influencing factors in view of Critical Discourse Analysis（CDA）.The paper explores the most frequently used local grammar patterns of evaluation with adjectives,and explores the similarities and differences between US supreme court opinions and Chinese Supreme People’s court opinions.Combining qualitative and quantitative methods,this paper employs corpus resources database and CDA methods.The paper finds two most frequent adjective local grammar patterns 1)it v-link ADJ that...and 2)it v-link ADJ to inf.,as well as their characteristics at text level（formal and semantic）.Major findings are mainly about the pattern features and parameters from function and semantic sides.Firstly,for such two local grammar patterns,they are more often used in the US court opinions.Secondly,the two patterns can be demonstrated respectively as 1)a.It[legal entity/act/proposition]v-link[is]ADJ that[certain]...,b.It[legal entity/act]v-link[is]ADJ that[reasonability]...;2)a.It[legal entity/physical world entity]v-link[is]ADJ to inf.[difficulty/mportance],b.It[legal entity/physical world entity]v-link[is]ADJ to inf.[difficulty/importance].Different parameters show different characteristics of the two sets of data.The evaluation features about the evaluated show the attitudes and opinions of the court towards different legal participants.At last,factors such as the social and cultural background are discussed by analyzing the texts from CDA perspective.As a conclusion,the present paper finds out that one of the most prominent features that is reflected through the two most frequent local grammar patterns is "power" permeates the China People’s supreme court opinions. |
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