A Study Of Power In Legislative Discourse- A Perspective Of Cda

The present study provides a critical analysis of hidden power in legislative discourse. It aims to describe linguistic features of legislative discourse and to explore the way by which legal language represents and manifests unequal power relations and to enhance people's power consciousness of legal language, enabling them to gain a deeper insight into social reality and obtain social recognition.Power relations are not only exercised and enacted in discourse, but also shaped and constructed by the interaction between participants,text and context. In order to have a clearer presentation of power relations in legislative discourse, Fairclough's three-dimensional model is adopted to help explain Halliday's Systemic-Functional Grammar which centers on the formal features of text as the first level of the theoretical framework. At this description level, legislative discourse is analyzed in terms of vocabulary,grammar and textual structure with the conclusion that lexical classification,nominalization,transitivity,modality and repetition are the main representations of unequal power relations inherent in legal language. As for the interpretation and the explanation level, the focus is laid on the social values associated with texts and the elements, and more generally on the social significance of test. All these levels contribute to define and reveal unequal power relations in legal discourse.The current research provides a practical reference for analyzing professional discourse and paves the way for linguists to probe into social relations. It adopts a functional-critical framework to analyze discourse to disclose its hidden meanings and may help laymen to read legal discourse from a critical perspective. Meanwhile, it also helps to assist legal professionals with linguistic theories in their daily work and make the law of the people, by the people, for the people.