Research On The Evolution Of Verdict Style In China

In this article several typical verdicts in the ancient times, the past a few centuries and nowadays are picked out to probe the change and development of China's verdict writing style in a critically linguistic perspective. Through the specific language employed in the verdicts the author tries to demonstrate that China's verdict writing style has experienced a "close-open-close-open" mode from the ancient till now, presenting us a "Z"-like trend. Whatever they are the literary, emotional and moralization of the ancient verdicts, or the sublation of traditions of the verdicts in the past a few centuries together with its introduction of external samples (unfortunately sometimes end up with confusions), or even the policy-orientation, politicization, militarization, publication and so on of the verdicts nowadays, they manifest that all the verdicts are manipulated by the underlying ideology of their own times, that they never completely make it into the sphere of legal style, and that China's verdict writing style needs to be standardized (or modernized). Apart from the verdict-writer's subjective factors, the objective social language environment contributes a lot to the verdict style. Its change will result in the increase of the elements of style's shift and the formation of individual features. From the path of split and merge of the verdict style in different historical language contexts, the individual features will appear in its own social cultural background and also we are able to conclude the regularity between the verdict style and the social and cultural factors. This article consists of five chapters, except from the introduction and conclusion. The introduction deals with the present situation of the research home and abroad of the issue in the question and its significance. The main idea and the summary of references will also be found in the introduction.Chapter One illustrates China's verdict style and its features, defines relevant concept and explicit the verdict style's position in the style system, laying the foundation for the following parts. In pragmatics, style is a system which is consistent with each communication function and context. Those features formed from abstract progress make up a complex which becomes a style. Each style comes into being as a result of social intercourse needs and each one has its own material and skill to represent its features. Actually, it is an abstract complex of various figures of speech. Only one figure of speech or few can not make one specific complex, multiple can do. Verdicts are to be valued by people for its important social value and are the most representative type among legal documents. Its style features are enough to represent judicial written style; thereby standardization of the verdict style should be typical to be researched. China's verdicts enjoy a long history and have experienced thousands years of changes, and now it possesses its special character. As an independent style sample, verdict style is a functional variant when language is applied in the judicial verdicts and is created to fit in the judicial judgment and objectives. Its features can be reflected as:rational, specialization, in written form and neutral.Linguistic style can be categorized into many groups. From the aspect of expression methods it can be categorized as spoken and written styles. The former one mainly deals with the sound while the latter the written words. The written style can be further categorized into official business style, political argumentative style, literary style and technology style. The position that verdict style occupies in the language style system should be:style-written style-official business style-legal official business style-judicial official business style-verdict style.Chapter Two illustrates China's verdict style in the ancient times, including the brief development, features and factors of formation. This article is mainly based on ,, and ,< Ming Kung' Verdicts>,, Yu Chenglong, Lu Jiashu, Zhang Chuanshan, Fan Zengxiang in Qing Dynasty and so on. The author demonstrates that the ancient verdicts had gone through the bud, embryo, boom, restoration and sublimation, in each stage of which the style experienced a slight shift but shared the same trend in the whole, i.e. the literary, moralization and emotional of the style. The reason of the existence of the mentioned features involves the verdict-writers and social culture. In the ancient, especially after Tang Dynasty, the literary trend of the verdict style was determined by the interpreting methods used by the writer. According to , in Tang Dynasty the verdict writing part in the imperial examination was for testing whether examinee could "grasp the facts, apply laws skillfully, tell right from wrong and cite precedents and masterpieces". Therefore, the outstanding examinee was qualified to not only be proficient in verses but also deal with practical issues. In reality, however, when judging a verdict the examiners put emphasis on the literary gift of the verdict. They paid attention to the flowery language, the neat antithesis and the precise quotation. Reasonably, the literary value of verdict writing was promoted to a higher level while the practical and pragmatic value was suppressed because the tops were better at writing poem than entering politics. In the existing verdicts of Tang Dynasty, almost every one inclined to literature style with rather high literary value. The other important factor is the effect of contemporary social culture. The ancient China combined discipline rite and law and implanted rite into legal system, which created a firm environment for the moralization of the verdicts. Thus from Dong Zhongshu< Adjudicating Case by Chunqiu> in Han Dynasty the ancient China's verdicts formed a tradition, i.e. verdicts relied on law and morality; and the language embedded in the verdicts had a strong inclination to advocate morality. Meanwhile, the ancient China did not distinguish between executive and judicial department. The judicial department was badly intervened by the executive one and the unequal phenomena were everywhere. Besides, people cared more of criminal and less of civil disputes; and the verdict-writer was the executive and judicial official. Especially in Tang-Song period, when facing with the civil disputes and minor criminal cases, the grass-roots officials usually referred to an examination model-"model verdict" rather than made a "genuine verdict" on a case-by-case basis. The verdicts in Ming-Qing period were very brief. Few of them could make it an article. In conclusion, there is a huge difference between ancient verdicts and verdicts nowadays. Verdict-writers always settle down cases in an executive official's eye rather than a legal professional's way. It is obvious that those writers convey their verdicts in a teaching and even emotional way. Consequently, full of emotion is a distinctive feature of ancient verdict style. Chapter Three analyzes China's verdict style in the past a few centuries. This chapter chooses several typical verdicts in the late Qing Dynasty, Republic of China and Shensi-Kansu-Ningsia Border Region to analyze the features and causes of verdict style (1848-1949). At that time, the ancient China's verdicts were going through a tremendous change in style. From the late Qing Dynasty, China was forced to merge itself into the global system under the invasion of western powers. It is right in this social change that traditional verdict style began to transfer to the modern style. A new trend in style features appeared:patterning, briefing and rational. The causes are involved with legal system and language movement. Following the Opium War of 1840 (Daoguang 20) China declined to a semi-feudal and semi-colonial country. Western legal thought and system flowed into China, rendering Chinese law system dissolved. In the meanwhile, judicial documents experienced a huge change. Traditional ancient judicial documents were abandoned and verdict-making differentiated from pattern to content. During the legal system reform in the late Qing Dynasty, according to Shenjiaben's edited in Xuantong period, China explored the modern judicial document pattern and unified the civil and criminal cases verdicts based on the experience of Japanese and German judicial documents writing methods together with the practical situation of China's legal culture. From then on the relatively fixed pattern for China's verdict style gradually took shape. The judicial documents in Republic of China developed from the mentioned pattern and had a few changes compared with the civil and criminal cases verdicts in the late Qing Dynasty. They emphasized more on the logical reasoning and content, strengthened the specialization of the language while maintained brief and well-knit. The verdict style at that time presented relatively high standard. In the Republic of China, the revolutionary based area and the liberated area adopted current prevailing pattern with slight changes. The language style became more easy-to-read although it was mixed with classical Chinese. The content of verdicts changed materially because of the different political power and legal system.Moreover, the contact and exchange between Chinese and Western culture increased gradually since the Opium War tore down the wall around the provincial imperial country. At first China was only informed of the superior western firepower; later she realized that a new produce method was needed to update weapons; finally she understood that the issue lied in the revolution of education. As for the China after the Opium War, the sense of crisis in the national salvation brought about the movement of language unification in the modern sense, which was a vernacular movement spreading out to cultivate people and popularize knowledge. That movement promoted greatly the modernization transition of traditional verdict style.Chapter Four is about the critical thinking of China's verdict style nowadays. The most significant feature of modern China's judiciary documents is that judicial documents in four legal domains co-exist (mainland, Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan). The author here probes into the verdict style standardization issues in the mainland since 1949. The verdicts in the early days, Cultural Revolution, the 1980s and the recent years are picked out to be compared with those in Taiwan and Hong Kong. Overall, the verdict style in the mainland after 1949 was developing in a closed environment and established its modernization, massilization and nationalization under the effect of Mao Zedong's authoritative and core language style. While the verdict style in Taiwan was affected by the alien language-Japanese and dialects such as Fujian dialect, Hakka and Malayo-Polynesian to some extent, but it reserved the same pattern with the prototype in the mainland in the end of the 1940s. Therefore both of them share the same origin and have a strong link. With the development of modern written Chinese in the 20th century, the verdict style in the mainland after 1949 can be roughly divided into three phases:the mixture of classical Chinese and vernacular in 1920-1940; the modern vernacular absolutely consistent with spoken Chinese in 1950-1970; the infiltration of the alien elements in 1980-1990. In the 1920-1940 the development of modern Chinese was reflected by the vernacular movement, aiming to substitute the classical Chinese which was not spoken any more for vernacular which cohesive with the spoken language. The path of the development reflects the formation of syllogism "main body-fact-reason" passed down from the Republic of China; and then it established half-classic-half-vernacular style with a strong policy tendency based on the domestic situation. Having gone through the vernacular movement in the 1920s, public language movement in the 1930s and the Language Construction Movement based on the nation standard in the 1940s, the modern Chinese has been standardized maturely in the middle and later half of the 1940s. China has realized the transition from classical Chinese to vernacular Chinese and then to the universal modern language of Han nation; and completed the unification of Chinese modernization, massilization and nationalization. It can be said that modern Chinese "sets Beijing accent as standard, Beijing dialect fundamental dialect, model modern vernacular masterpiece the grammar regulation". After examining the verdict style in 1950-1960, we find the vernacular Chinese coincide with the spoken language. Meanwhile, in the late 1950s, the pattern of the structure of verdicts changed from "main body-fact-reason" to "fact-reason-conclusion (case judgment)". However, with the beginning of Anti the Right (reserved party) movement in the latter half of 1957, ultra-Left (radical party) trend of thought were rampant and the nihilism were sprawling. The legal procedure and legal documents pattern were ignored and even regarded as "red tape". The judicial documents were of low quality soon after the judicial department was dismissed in 1959. Especially in the ten-year catastrophe of Cultural Revolution, the patterns for judicial documents were destroyed during the crazy cult of "smashing public security organs, procuratorial organs and people's courts". After the 1960s, the verdict style in the mainland drew much closer to the vernacular style and evolved towards massilization. During the Cultural Revolution, the violent political function of the verdicts drove the verdicts of the mainland towards individual-worshiping and revolution-oriented direction. The verdict writing drifted away from the style prototype, only to become a malformed style. This phenomenon displays: political language replaced legal language, emotional language replaced rational one, straight replaced speculative, subjective replaced neutral; a mess of patterns and flexible verdict-writers.From the 1980s and the 1990s, the Reform and Opening Up provided the verdict style with a brand new language environment. With the improvement of legislative construction, the passage of a few important laws and the restoration of procuratorial organs and judicial administrative organs, the judicial documents again received high attention. After the restoration of judicial department, the common court management implemented and carried out in June 1980, with 8 categories and 64 types in all, unifying the pattern of judicial documents. In the process of reform of state's organs in 1982, judicial department's managements of common courts and special courts were dismissed; the judicial administrative work was assigned to the Supreme Court. Till then the pattern of documents were implemented and revised by public security organs, procuratorial organs, people's courts and judicial administration, respectively. In June 1992 the Supreme Court implemented based on the original pattern, with 14 categories 314 types in all, manifesting that the verdict pattern was gradually complete. In March 1996, National People's Congress made an important revision of the Criminal Procedural Law, resulting in the further revision of verdict pattern. The the Supreme Court passed in April 1999 deleted 8 types in criminal procedural documents while added 53 new types. At the same time, with the increase of international communication and wide spread of modern mass media, foreign words pour into the Chinese vocabulary together with new stuff and new concepts, which make it a fourth big scale wave of loanword (the former three waves are Han's loanwords from Western region, loanwords from Buddhism in Han-Wei-Tang-Song Dynasty, loanwords from western technology in the past a few centuries). In the fourth wave a large number of legal terms flooded into the Chinese vocabulary. The verdict style entered a new stage. In accompany of judicial reform, the social value of legal documents is highlighted now and people require higher and higher quality of the writing. Besides, the pattern and standardization also need constant improvement and the issue of the standardization has become a hot topic among people. Logically, from the 1980s verdict style is mainly reflected as the conflicts and coordination between pattern and individuality, standardization and custom, clarity and ambiguity, thoroughness and brevity.Chapter Five is about the future of China's verdict style. It aims at the personalization, patterning, mergence, contextual restriction, comparison and reference of verdict style. The personal view focusing on the problems exist in the research of verdict style reform is raised. The development of verdict style is baised on the handle of patterning and personalization, close and open, inheritance and reference. There is deep cultural basis and modern significance in the inheritance of elite of ancient verdict style. China has a long way to go to make the verdict style perfect.