The Study Of Attitudinal Resources In Chinese Criminal Judgements

In 2013,the Supreme People’s Court launched a website called China Judgements Online,which stipulated "all the effective judgements of the court,except for four types related to state secrets,personal privacy,juvenile crimes and inappropriate posting,will be fully published on the Internet since January 1st 2014."As a result,all the public can access written judgements at any time.As the most easily available legal teaching material around the citizens,the written judgement embodies the essence of law.It is also the most direct way for common citizens to start to know something about law.This thesis randomly chooses 35 criminal written judgements from the China Judgements Online,attempts to analyze criminal judgements documents from a linguistic perspective,and reveal the distribution characteristics and interpersonal functions of attitudinal resources in the criminal judgements,aiming to provide more perspectives and ideas for the analysis of judgment documents.At the same time,let more students not majoring in law pay attention to the law.Thus make a contribution towards expanding the way of thinking criminal judgements,strengthening the propagation of knowledge of the law and enhancing all citizens’ legal awareness.The writer also wants to enable herself to cultivate some law spirits which advocated by the society.This thesis analyzes the attitude resources in 35 Chinese criminal judgments by using the appraisal theory,finding that:(1)the judgment function is the primary function of criminal judgment,while attitude expression is an important resource to realize this function;(2)The largest number of attitude expression is judgment,followed by appreciation,and affect takes the least proportion;(3)Most attitude expressions are negative,indicating that it is the basic discourse tendency of criminal judgment to judge people and objects in a negative way;(4)The judgment of social sanction is more than that of social esteem.In the judgment of social sanction,the judgment of legality is more than that of propriety and veracity.The judgment of legality is helpful to judge whether the defendant is guilty or innocent,what crime the defendants commit and how to sentence them.This thesis enriches and develops the appraisal theory to a certain extent:adding the subclass of legality judgment into the judgment subsystem of attitude system;adding the subclass of legality appreciation in the subsystem of appreciation.In addition,appreciation was divided into two types:judgment-invoking appreciation and non-judgment-invoking appreciation;and classifies the react,composition and evaluation under the original appreciation system into the latter,namely non-judgment-invoking appreciation.In addition,this paper also makes qualitative and quantitative analysis of micro attitude,task attitude and macro attitude in the criminal judgment,thus verifying the rationality and effectiveness of the attitude system framework and providing a new research idea for the future study of legal judgment documents.