| Recent years have witnessed a surge of civil lawsuits leading to a tension between an overwhelming number of cases and a shortage of judicial personnel.In light of this,the summing up of issues(SUI)has been increasingly recognized as an indispensable move to optimize judicial resources and improve trial efficiency in China’s ongoing judicial reform.Set in the context of Chinese civil court hearings,the SUI is a process where disputes are streamlined and the focal ones are summed up,leaving out the undisputed information and the disputed yet trivial one.Keen attention has been paid to the SUI as a matter of legal knowledge and skills,but it has seldom been associated with the use of language.Motivated by the need for a linguistic analysis of the SUI in Chinese civil court hearings,this study aims to explore how issues are summed up from the perspective of discourse information.In this study,the SUI is regarded as a step-wise process of information processing,involving information selection,information development,and information organization.By centering on the Discourse Information Theory(DIT)and incorporating the Conceptual Blending Theory(CBT)and other relevant findings,we develop an analytical framework for the analysis of information processing in the SUI.To guide the analysis,three research questions are proposed accordingly:(1)What are the features of information selection in the SUI?(2)How is the selected information further developed in the SUI?(3)Why does information turn out to be organized in certain forms in the SUI? In answer to these research questions,we establish a dataset of 50 civil cases and adopt a qualitative research method.Through data analysis,it is found that(1)In information selection,the selected information units lie more at the upper information levels than the lower ones.Attitudinal(WA,WI and WJ),factual(WF and WT),and procedural information knots(WB and WP)each have a distinctive role to play therein.Besides,information units of issues are largely derived from single or multiple in-text sources,with intertextual ones being yet another important source of information selection.(2)Subsequent to information selection,information development in the SUI generally involves the enrichment,omission and generalization of information elements.They are further governed by the cognitive processes of conceptual blending,each following different rules and operating in diverse manners.(3)For the end products yielded in information organization — issues of fact and issues of law — several sets of information patterns are generated respectively.In these patterns,the use of interrogatives serves as the common thread,and certain subtypes of information elements are reconsidered.Such forms of information organization are mediated by legal factors including legally binding and non-binding norms,and linguistic factors at the lexical,syntactic,and discourse levels.This study will hopefully enrich the theoretical applications of the DIT in legal discourse,and enhance the practice of the SUI by offering some linguistic insights into the study of the SUI and other legal contexts largely depending on it.In so doing,it may facilitate the implementation of issue-centered court hearings and the composition of issue-centered judgments,and ultimately spur the ongoing judicial reform in China. |
