A Contrastive Study Of English And Chinese Versions Of TRIPS From The Perspective Of Three Metafunctions

This paper offers a contrastive analysis between English and Chinese versions of WTO Intellectual Property Rights Agreement from the perspective of three metafunctions: interpersonal function, ideational function and textual function in order to gain an insight into both the homogeneity and heterogeneity of the two unrelated languages (English and Chinese) in legal texts.English and Chinese versions of TRIPS have lots of same characteristics. In terms of interpersonal function, the sameness of both versions boils down to the use of lots of provisions about the obligations and the rights of the members, while fewer prohibitive provisions. Mood adjuncts of polarity, technical terms, archaic words, declarative clauses and long clause complexes frequently occur and comment adjuncts can seldom be traced in two texts, which reflect such features as definiteness, relative stability, compulsion and formality. And both versions can arouse the aesthetic feelings of rigor and logic. From the angle of ideational function, the overwhelming majority of material and relational processes appear in both versions and nominalization is used broadly, which show the characteristics of norm, fossilization, coordination, objectification, impartiality, inexorability and complication at the level of the word etc. And from the perspective of textual function, the positions of the themes in both English and Chinese clauses are the first constituents and conditioned clause complexes are frequently used in two texts. And among the five types of cohesive devices used in two texts, reference, conjunction and lexical cohesion are largely used, and substitution as well as ellipsis is seldom used in both versions of TRIPS. These characteristics indicate that two versions are marked by objective, flexible, realistic, coherent and complicated at the level of the clause complex as well as the text.The differences are also identified. In terms of interpersonal function, semantic meanings of most Chinese modal verbs are English content verbs correspondingly. The number of Chinese mood adjuncts is more than that of English mood adjuncts, which...