On Rhetoric And The Acceptability Of Chinese Judgements

Judgments are the results and the written form of judicial decisions, which reflects the whole judicial processes, the main purpose of which is to document, and report judicial processes and decisions, which are based on appropriate interpretations of legislative intentions. Also, judgment is the final carrier of judicial justice, and is an important way to improve the public reliability of judicature and an important link for people to see and understand judicial justice. Therefore, with the development of judicial democratization, the form and the content of judgment are in the spotlight, and as a part of the judicial reform, the importance of the reform of the judgment is needless to say.Under the theoretical framework of modern rhetoric and with the application of various linguistic theories, absorbing the relative thoughts from New Rhetoric, Communicology and Psychology, this study aims to conduct a research on explanation and analysis of judgment from a relatively more comprehensive point of view, both in a static and dynamic way. The research is conducted from the perspective of self-adjustment function of language, describing the rhetoric features of judgment, devoted to discover and interpret the rules of expression influencing the acceptability of judgment, probing a bridge between judgment and public acceptability.Whether or not the judgment will be accepted by the parties and the public also depends on the truth representation of the legal fact, citation of law and reasonable interpretation of inferential processes by means of rhetorical description. The calling for the judges to explain detailed reasons and the reinforcement on judiciary reasons is not only a new break for the systematic reform, but also an important basis for the development of legal hermeneutics which fit with the real needs of judicial documents reform.Rhetoric plays an important role in persuasion of judgment. Judges not only need to convince parties and lawyers, but also the public, especially in those hot and controversial cases. In judicial practice, rhetoric is not a way of beautify lines or an instrument of catching public's eyes, but a way to enrich justice and strengthen the weaker points. Rhetoric is a vital approach to convince the public to accept the judgment.Rhetoric is divided into two categories:the special and the general. The special rhetoric is focused on language form or methods, targets on rhetoric methods in language system. The general rhetoric refers all the methods conciliating social conflicts. It not only refers rhetoric methods in text but also includes logic inference and the ways to strength the persuasion during the judgment-making process. This research is based on the general rhetoric theory.Except the overall characteristic of legal language, the language style of judgment appears official document style characteristics owing to the object and context restriction. Different from artistic style pursuit of visualization, vividness and exaggeration, the rule of passive rhetoric methods targeting at expressiveness, precision and concision is abided by in judgment. Thus a question occurs:what makes it persuasive?Social Psychology indicates:when people have the awareness of being persuaded, they begin to defend themselves psychologically. Therefore, persuasion unconsciously is most effective. In judgment, deep rhetoric is the motive power of persuasion with shaping or changing the public's mind by transferring implying information.The study starts with the definition of deep rhetoric, and then concludes seven implicit persuasive methods:evaluation, hedging, presupposition, conversational implicature, intertextuality, emotion arousing and narrative cut, which have direct effect of acceptability of judgment. Also, this research not only considers rhetoric in judgment as an expressive skill, but also an inferential method which is not merely a legal technical support but a showing of judge's trial thoughts. Under most situations, rhetorical argument not merely helps the public think, but directly urges them to accept the verdict under logic cover. This study also points out rhetoric would be abused in some way for judge to reach his own unlawful purposes. Thus, language cultivation in judgment should be paid attention.