| This paper describes and analyzes the stylistic features of WTO agreements (English version) from four levels: graphetics and graphology, lexis, syntax, and text with the theory of modern stylistics and the view of speech acts and iconicity. It is expected that these description and interpretation may shed some enlightening light for understanding and translating these agreements and documents of other similarities, and will pose further research questions in the study of legal language.The World Trade Organization (WTO) is the legal and organizational basis for multilateral trade system. At its heart are the WTO agreements. As these agreements impose obligations and confer rights on WTO members, they belong to legislative documents. The English language used to draft these rules has specific features. It is different from ordinary language with respect to vocabulary and style. This language is called legal English or the English language of law (the language of law). Legal language means the language or a part of the language that is used in describing the concepts in legal science and lawsuits. David Mellinkoff (1963), David Crystal and Derek Davy (1969), HouWeirui (1988), ZhangDelu (1998) have made variety analysis on it, Bhatia(1993) has done genre analysis on legal discourse, Garzone (2000), Zhao Yuhong (2001), Ayfer Altay (2002) and other scholars have made researches for the purpose of law translation. But few researches are made with the theory of pragmatics except that done by Anna Trosborg (1995) and ZhangXinhong (2000). It is also rare to describe the linguistic features of legislative documents of economy and trade.David Crystal and Derek Davy (1969) have had a detailed discussion on the stylistic analytical framework. They propose to describe the features of text at the following levels: (1) graphetics and graphology; (2) phonetics and phonology; (3) syntax; (4) lexis and (5) semantics. Later stylisticians often adopted this framework. Vijay K. Bhatia(1993) suggests three levels of linguistic analysis: (1) analysis of lexico-grammatical features; (2) analysis of text-patterning or textualization; (3) structural interpretation of the text-genre. Genre analyst may concentrate on one or more of the above levels of linguistic realization. In this thesis, We describe and analyze the linguistic features of WTO agreements, mainly following the framework set by David Crystal and Derek Davy, together with Bhatia's analysis levels, applying Austin and Searle's speech acts theory, the viewpoint of iconicity and other research resultsmade in forensic linguistics. Through the quantitative and qualitative analysis on graphetic and graphological, lexical, syntactic, and textual levels of the sample data drawn from WTO agreements, we can see WTO agreements have distinctive features shared by legislative language for economy and trade. Briefly, they are: using special graphetic and graphological devices, using formal and precise words, using a great amount of regulative modal verbs that impose obligations and confer rights, extensive use of economic and trade terminology, using complex syntactic structure to achieve objectiveness and preciseness at the cost of readability, using mainly lexical repetition as a cohesive device and a variety of intertextual and interdiscursive links rarely noticed in any other discourse. We also suggest there is social, historical, pragmatic and cognitive motivation that can explain why these agreements take such a style.
|
PDF Full Text Request