An Attempting Research In Rhetoric In Legal Language

The law represents the national will and authority. Being a special subject for practical purposes, the study of law has its unique features and characteristics. It is in some sense the study of the society and of a certain writing form. From linguistic and semiotic perspectives, the law is the congregate of symbols aiming at getting each of the legal articles into a concrete shape to administer and coordinate with the society.The thesis first briefs the features of the law: authoritativeness, imperativeness, equality, law's being established by common practice, and its administering nature. It then reviews the rise of the forensic language and the studies of rhetoric in forensic language and summarizes the features of forensic language in terms of phonetics, lexicology, syntax, etc.Based upon the discussion of the forensic narrative, the thesis analyzes rhetoric in legal language. The study of rhetoric in legal language has long been under dispute. Many believe that the legal language is supposed to be concise and plain without rhetoric. Yet as forensic rhetoric is not equal to rhetoric in literary language, rhetorical analysis of traditional literary language cannot be applied in the analysis of forensic rhetoric. The analysis within this dissertation focuses upon pragmatic concerns of forensic language, that is, rhetoric in legal language, in hopes of bringing into full play its functioning in social administration and its authoritativeness and sacredness.The thesis analyzes positive (active) and passive rhetoric. Positive rhetoric is first discussed. It features, syntactically, the utilization of parallelism and passive voice. Parallelism makes the expression distinct and readable while the utilization of passive voice is mostly out of the following two reasons: first, a legal case mainly concerns the fact instead of who conducts it; the passive voice highlights the act and defines the performer in a much broader sense. Second, in a legal writ, the performer's identity is ambiguous and indiscernible. In terms of phonetics, though modern legal language seldom uses alliteration, traces of alliteration can still be found in ancient legal languages. The thesis analyzes the grammar and the forms of narrative in passive rhetoric. So...