A Contrastive Analysis Of Interpersonal Meta-discourse Between The Constitution Of The People’s Republic Of China And Constitution Of The United States

Meta-discourse refers to the means by which writers organize a text, express their attitude and establish a relationship with readers. As an important means of conveying the information, facilitating understanding and building writer-reader interactions, meta-discourse can be analyzed from different perspectives, such as from social and communicative, functional, cognitive, and teaching view. Despite its importance and popularity, it has always been something of a fuzzy term. In fact, there are still controversies about its definition and classification.Being a part of utterance, meta-discourse indicates the writer(speaker)’s subjectivity and intentionality as utterance always shows individuals’personality. Humans live in a world where there are communications and dialogues. Given the interpersonal meaning is realized by interpersonal meta-discourse, dialogicality among the subjects can be realized through interpersonal meta-discourse. The previous research of meta-discourse focuses on academic papers, writing curriculum and forth these years, and there is few research on legislative discourse, let alone Chinese legislative texts. This paper intends to investigate the Constitution of the People’s Republic of China (the PRC Constitution) and Constitution of the United States and make a contrastive analysis of the interpersonal meta-discourse.Based on the previous researches and a theoretical foundation that meta-discourse is subjective, intersubjective and dialogical, the present paper describes the explicit and implicit meta-discourse from the perspective of language philosophy and pragmatics. Explicit meta-discourse is meta-discourse markers, while implicit meta-discourse is grammatical meta-discourse, which includes textual grammatical meta-discourse, interpersonal grammatical meta-discourse and textual/interpersonal multi-functional grammatical meta-discourse. Interpersonal grammatical meta-discourse usually adopts intonation, mood and modality. The strategy of textual/interpersonal multi-functional meta-discourse is thematic structure, information structure, hypotaxis and parataxis, discourse distribution. The paper analyzes all the interpersonal meta-discourse.Figures in this paper have shown interpersonal meta-discourse markers in the two discourse(preamble and the main body). The total number of implicit meta-discourse (grammatical meta-discourse) has not been counted due to intricate grammar and limited time. However, the present paper enumerates detailed examples. Analysis results suggest that the number of explicit meta-discourse is much fewer than implicit meta-discourse in the two discourse, which means the writers implicitly intrude into the texts. The explicit meta-discourse used in the two discourse is similar in terms of number, but the patterns differ from each other. There are attitude markers in the preamble of the PRC Constitution, however, the writer does not use such features in the United States Constitution. The paper also illuminates implicit meta-discourse used in the two discourse. The findings reveal that the application of meta-discourse is closely linked to the characteristics of legislative texts. In order to establish an obligatory identity, the two constitutions describe the provisions in declarative mood, which belongs to a kind of grammatical meta-discourse. Furthermore, despite the difference in adoption of various modal words, both texts still employ such kind of modal words to announce the inviolability characteristic of the constitution. The two texts are distributed according to various provisions, suggesting that the legislative discourse aims to be concise. Although the two texts belong to the same genre, the interpersonal meta-discourse presented by the writers is different. Usage of grammatical meta-discourse in the PRC Constitution is much more than that in the United States Constitution.The paper further discusses the different distributions of interpersonal meta-discourse based on the theoretical foundation of dialogic meta-discourse after explaining and analyzing a number of detailed examples. It insists that even in the same genre, the extent of meta-discourse involvement varies from writers’different subjectivity, ideologies and different intrusions of discourse. Though there is no personal judgment or attitude in the objective and rigorous legislative language, subjective factors do exist in such discourse from the view of implicit meta-discourse.On the basis of the research results, this paper can enrich meta-discourse theory in a degree. First, it expands the scope of studies on meta-discourse use to legislative genre, which would provide a broader view on meta-discourse use in legislative discourse. In addition, examination on the grammatical meta-discourse provides us another perspective to understand the meta-discourse theory. Finally, this study also offers something to digest for a better understanding of legislative discourse writing and reading. During the writing process, the writers should try to employ the appropriate meta-discourse in order to make a successful writing. In the reading process, the readers should be aware of all the types of meta-discourse to understand the writers’ stance and achieve a successful communication.