A Genre Analysis Of English Legal Memoranda

As the country is much more open to the outside world, higher demands have been imposed on law-related professionals in China. Linguistic study on legal English has become a trend and generic study is also a hot issue in linguistics, but they fail to be combined together extend the study to legal memoranda, a specific but important legal writing. Some generic knowledge of English legal text is helpful when legal professionals handle their routine communication. Recent years have seen the development of a number of approaches to genre analysis on the legal texts, which is still insufficient both in quantity and quality.This thesis aims to describe the generic feature of legal memoranda. Move structures and linguistic features will be examined.After analyzing dozens of legal memoranda in authentic English, the writer finds that there exists a typical four-move-structure in each legal memorandum. Some complementary linguistic features in the legal texts have also been discovered.All these findings in the thesis are open to suggestion and even critics for the coming insightful and deepening studies by scholars and experts.