A Study Of Judges’ Pragmatic Identity In American Court Judgments Of Business Cases From The Perspective Of Metadiscourse

The court judgment,the written form of the court’s decision,is the authentic recording of the whole trial process,reasons and evidence involved in a case.As a kind of legal text which can reproduce the entire court trial of a case comprehensively,court judgments,especially those in case law countries like the United States,have attracted the attention of linguistics researchers.And,the same with well-reasoned academic papers,court judgments also contain abundant metadiscourse resources.However,the relationship between discourse and identity is another hot topic in the field of linguistics.Therefore,it is of great significance to study the metadiscourse in court judgments written by judges and its contribution to the construction of judges’ pragmatic identity.Based on Hyland’s interpersonal model of metadiscourse and Professor Chen Xinren’s pragmatic identity theory,the present study takes American court judgments of business cases as the corpus and combines qualitative and quantitative analysis to identify the use of metadiscourse in court judgments of business cases and to find out what pragmatic identities American judges construct through those metadiscourse for achieving different communicative purposes.According to the result of this study,the following conclusions can be reached.Firstly,in American court judgments of business cases,there are rich metadiscourse resources and interactive metadiscourse is used more frequent than interactional metadiscourse,reflecting the interpersonal property of court judgments.For all subcategories of interactive metadiscourse,American judges apply transitions most frequently to sort out the rich information content of court judgments for facilitating readers’ understanding of the content;for all subcategories of interactional metadiscourse,American judges use self-mentions and boosters more frequently to shorten the social distance with readers and enhance the certainty of the discourse.Secondly,American judges constructed six types of pragmatic identity through different subcategories of metadiscourse.In American court judgments of business cases,judges construct the pragmatic identity of logical organizers of legal facts through transitions,frame markers,and endophoric markers;judges’ pragmatic identity as defender of court decisions is constructed through boosters,evidentials,and attitude markers;the identity of authoritative adjudicator is constructed through selfmentions and evidentials;the identity of patient popularizers of the law is constructed through endophoric markers,code glosses,and evidentials;the identity of polite persuader is constructed through hedges and attitude markers;the identity of active interlocutor is constructed through engagement markers,self-mentions,and attitude markers.In order to sort out the legal information in the long passage of court judgments,American judges act as the identity of organizers of legal facts most frequently.And constrained by the delayed interaction between the communicating parties in the legal text,American judges appear as interlocutors or polite persuaders less frequently.This study enriches the empirical research of metdiscourses and pragmatic identity,reveals the interpersonal nature of court judgments,explores the metdiscourse’s function of identity construction from the pragmatic perspective,and further sorts out the relationship between metdiscourses and pragmatic identity construction.In addition,this study can also provide some pragmatic reference for judges in case law countries and other countries to build friendly writer-reader relationship when writing court judgments.