Cohesion Of Legal English Discourse Viewed Through Legislative Texts

Since the 1950s, discourse analysis or text linguistics has become one of independent subjects in the field of linguistics. As a newly emerging interdisciplinary branch of modern linguistics, it aims at helping people to make up and understand all kinds of coherent discourses. At present, many linguists at home and abroad are paying a good deal of attention to what is going on in this field. Discourse analysis attempts to describe and explain language phenomena which were largely neglected by traditional language study. What the traditional grammar and the structural grammar together with the transformational generative grammar study is limited to the level of sentence and its components. Those grammarians do not adequately take into consideration the relations between sentences and their positions and functions in a larger language unit. It is difficult to define language units' communicative functions if there were no concrete contexts and occasions. More and more linguists have come to realize that language study should not be confined at the sentence level. It must go beyond the sentence bounds and study the functions of sentence groups and paragraphs in discourse. Thus discourse analysis or text linguistics came into being as an independent subject.It is well-known that discourse/text is the object of study of discourse analysis/text linguistics. In different scholars' works, discourse/text has different meanings. Some linguists take text as the written form of language but discourse as the spoken form of it. In fact, the differences between discourse and text are territorial. They are the same in essence. American linguists prefer to use discourse and discourse analysis while European linguists use text and text linguistics. Hu Zhuanglin says in his Discourse Cohesion and Coherence that there is no need to distinguish the two unless there is the necessity to do so. In this paper, "discourse" refers to actual language used insocial context, namely it refers to both the spoken and the written forms of language in use, which is a dynamic process, while "text" is used to refer to the record or product of discourse, which is static.Cohesion and coherence are two important terms in discourse analysis. Linguists study discourse from different angles. Accordingly they define these two terms in different ways. Scholars in China always take cohesion as lexical and grammatical devices—a matter of form. Coherence is an effect of a discourse consisting of these cohesive devices. When speaking of the relations between cohesion and coherence, linguists hold identical and divergent views on them. For example, Halliday and Hasan think that cohesion is a necessary though not a sufficient condition for the coherence of text, while H. Widdowson considers that cohesion is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for the creation of a coherent discourse.Discourse, spoken and written, can be classified into political, economic, scientific, business and legal discourses etc. in terms of register. This paper attempts to explore in detail a particular discourse feature—cohesion in the English legal discourse, which is a particular register of discourse.Legal English discourse is an actual use of English in legal interactive context. It is also manifested in both spoken and written modes. According to legal overall procedures, legal English discourse can be classified into 7 types, namely legislation, judicial documents, administrative decrees, oral communications, documents for litigation prepared by lawyers, legally binding documents and legal literature used for teaching, learning, and academic purposes. Among those diverse legal discourses, legislation or legislative provisions, which are of the greatest authority and least ambiguity, are in fact distinct from one another, hence calling for separate survey. In this paper, the legislative texts are used as the material analyzed. They are selected from 12 statutes in English, among which the latest American Uniform Commercial Code is the core.The author adopts the cohesion model developed by Halliday and Hasan, which mainly includes such devices as reference, substitution and ellipsis, conjunction, and lexical cohesion. By reviewing a wide range of literature in the field of language andthe law, the author stresses the importance of explicit textual cohesion in the English legislative texts and argues that on the premise of analyzing it a great advance in the study of discourse analysis or text linguistics can be brought about and this subject deserves the attention of linguists, legal draftsmen, law translators, and other social scientists working in this area.By detailed study of the cohesive devices used in legislative texts, the author concludes, largely due to the unique nature of legal language, which is, explicit, precise and unambiguous on the one hand while all-inclusive on the other, the textual cohesion in legislative texts in the English language is characterized by a number of distinguishing features. On the whole, unlike most other varieties of English, legal language makes a very rare use of cohesive devices, such as substitution and ellipsis. However, cohesion indeed exists in legal texts though there is much less chance of forming sentence groups in legal prose than in other varieties of English. Anaphoric reference and lexical reiteration are part of the distinguishing features. Personal reference is generally not preferred in English legislative text, though there is a tendency toward personalization by the preferred use of "he". The author deems this as the result of Plain English Movement. Regarding demonstrative reference, referential items are relatively near the referent in legislative provisions. As for comparative comparison, general comparison, in which general likeness is compared, is preferred to particular comparison. While within the general comparison, the contrast of differences is preferred to that of similarity and identity. In legislative texts, the variety of conjunctions used is limited. The most often used conjunctions are "and", "or", and "but". Lexical repetition is the prevailing form in legislative texts in English. Repetition of certain lexical item to enforce the cohesive effect, rather than omitting or substituting with a synonym or a general word, is a remarkable distinctiveness of legislative discourse. The typical repetition in legislative texts is that of some Article or Section listed earlier. Comparative detailed analyses have been given to cohesive devices as "then" and "so" in the legislative texts. The author concludes that "then" is more preferred than "so" in the role of causal conjunction.The author continues to point out that a proper understanding of thisdistinctiveness of cohesion in the English legislative texts is significant to social scientists in the field of language and that of law, for they might improve the discourse quality of their work with it practically, and improve and enrich their theory as well. And the unsolved problems, such as the rarer use of "said" and "aforesaid", and what the picture of cohesion in other types of legal English discourse is, are presented at the end of this paper, which provides new subjects for further research.