| In spite of diverging from the same origin and culture, each part of Greater China (Chinese Mainland, Hong Kong and Taiwan but excluding the Portuguese-speaking Macao) has its individual Chinese and English legal texts, which gives rise to the diversity of the legal systems and abundance of legal texts.As one part of the illocutionary verbs, performative verbs play the role of performatization by means of locutionary acts, illocutionary acts and perlocutionary acts, with which the law macrocontrols and regulates the society in the form of legal texts.This dissertation re-proposes its new typological classification of the performative verbs based on those given by John Searle, Geoffrey Leech, and Jurgen Habermas and the consideration of the general features of legal texts as well, that is, assertives, expressives, declaratives, directives, litigatives, and collaboratives, which are then induced into two major kinds:regulative performatives and operative performatives according to their own performance in the authentic contexts by conducting an exploratory factor analysis in the SPSS environment. Chinese/English Parallel Corpus of Legal Texts in Greater China (CEPCLTGC) with about10million words/characters has especially been built for the investigation of the applications of performative verbs in the legal texts. This dissertation expounds some major issues in building the corpus (CEPCLTGC) and conducts a systematic research of the application of the performative verbs in the legal texts in the three regions. Firstly large amount of the Chinese/English bilingual legal texts are collected from various sources and classified, in three dimensions, into different kinds, and then the texts are sampled by stratified random sampling for the purpose of building the corpus. After being POS-autotagged with CKIP autotag1.0and MLCT respectively, performative verbs are searched from the corpus and analyzed from the perspectives of semantics, syntax and pragmatics so as to research on the idiosyncrasies in the application of performative verbs among the Chinese/English bilingual texts in Greater China. Meanwhile, the software SPSS is employed to conduct some quantitative and qualitative Spearman co-relation analyses and Wilcoxon’s Sign Rank Tests of the performance of performative verbs in the large corpus.The main contents of this dissertation are briefly summarized as follows:Chapter One serves as the introduction in which such issues as the legal systems of Greater China, typological classification of Chinese verbs, features of performative verbs, significance of performative verbs research, research methods, hypothesis and some problems to be solved are fully addressed. Chapter Two is the literature review, which summarizes the development of performative verbs research, home and abroad. Chapter Three focuses on the theoretical frame, which includes the reclassification of performative verbs, classification motivation, the paradigm and methods of performative verbs research. This part mainly discusses the paradigm of corpus-based quantitative and qualitative analysis combined with the interpretational modes from the perspectives of semantics, syntax, and pragmatics. Chapter Four involves the expertise of the identification of performative verbs from the abundant Chinese/English bilingual legal texts, which explores the semantic and syntactic interfaces of Chinese performative verbs with Information-based Case Grammar (ICG) and the English performative verbs with the tagsets employed in MLCT for the identification of performative verbs from the parallel corpus of legal texts, in addition to the detailed introduction of the two softwares, Academia Sinica CKIP autotag1.0and Lancaster MLCT. At the very end of this chapter it introduces the building of the corpus (CEPCLTGC), which involves the collection of language data, typological classification of legal texts and stratified random sampling. Chapters Five-Seven are the highlights of this dissertation. Chapter Five conducts a semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic analysis of the Chinese performative verbs of legal texts in Greater China. Chapter Six is the data analysis of the English performative verbs retrieved from the corpus. Chapter Seven conducts a systematic analysis of the performance of the English performative verbs in the corpus which includes, respectively, the Spearman co-relation analyses of performative verbs between Chinese sub-corpora and English sub-corpora, exploratory factor analysis of both Chinese and English performative verbs, and the Wilcoxon’s Sign Rank Tests of the performative verbs in the legal texts of the three regions.This dissertation makes some contributions as follows:Firstly, as many as40millions words/characters of effective Chinese-English parallel legal texts in Greater China are collected and10million of which are retrieved by stratified random sampling to build the Chinese/English Parallel Corpus of Legal Texts in Greater China (CEPCLTCC) based on POS tagging and alignment. Secondly, through the research of the general features of the legal systems in the three regions (Chinese Mainland, Taiwan and Hong Kong), it tentatively conducts a3-dimentional typological classification of the sampled legal texts into national law and international law, department law, substantive law and adjective law, either from the system of civil law or from the system of common law; Thirdly, it employs CKIP autotag1.0and MLCT to autotag the Chinese and English texts respectively and corrects the errors for the retrieval of the performative verbs in AntConc environment. Fourthly, it investigates the performance of the performative verbs in the corpus and figures out the total frequencies as much as34605(Chinese:16809; English:17796). Fifthly, based on John Searle, Geoffrey Leech, and Jiirgen Habermas’typological classifications and the general features of legal texts, it re-classifies the performative verbs into the following7kinds:assertives, expressives, declaratives, directives, litigatives, and collaboratives, which are then induced into two major types: regulative performatives and operative performatives acccording to their own performance in the authentic contexts by conducting explanatory factor analyses in the SPSS environment. Lastly, it explores in details the semantic, syntactic and pragmatic features of Chinese performative verbs, and compares the application of Chinese and English performative verbs in the legal texts in the three regions by conducting Spearman co-relation analyses and Wilcoxon’s Sign Rank Tests. |
PDF Full Text Request