Functional Discourse Analysis Of Forensic Text

American Constitution is the first modern constitution in the Capitalist world and has abundant influence. It consists of original Constitution and 27 Amendments. American Constitution prescribes the formation of the nation, rights and responsibilities of its branches and its people. Consequently, it belongs to legislative documents. Legislative language is a branch of Forensic language, which means the language or a part of the language that is used in describing the concepts in legal science and lawsuits. Crystal and Davy (1969), Shao (1997), Zhang (1998), Chen (2005) have made variety analysis on it. Bhatia (1997) has done genre analysis on forensic discourse. Zhang (2000) did research on forensic discourse from the perspectives of Pragmatics. Du (2007) studied the tree information structure of legal discourse. Liao (2004), Shi and Xin (2008) analyze forensic text from perspectives of Systemic-Functional Grammar. Yuan (2008) studied the interpersonal meaning of police interrogation from the perspective of appraisal.This paper describes and analyzes the textual features of American Constitution and its Amendments from the perspectives of three meta-functions. The paper will analyze and evaluate the textual features from the perspectives of register theory trying to discover the relations between context, function and form. This paper will adopt the three steps in discourse analysis proposed by Halliday (1994) to do the research. This paper will first analyze and describe the textual features of American Constitution and its Amendments from the perspectives of three meta-functions; then the paper will evaluate the textual features from the angle of register theory to further discover the relation between register, function and form. Through the quantitative and qualitative analysis of the material, we find that: in terms of ideational function, material process possesses the major position; relational process is in the second place. These two processes are in the dominant position. The ideational function shows the construction of the government and balance of powers; in terms of interpersonal function, all clauses are declarative, which is to transmit information. So this Forensic text is speaker-oriented."Shall"is in the dominant position, which is the modal operator with median value. It emphasizes both obligation and politeness; in terms of Textual Function, the paper analyzes the data from the perspectives of"Markedness". The unmarked theme outweighs marked theme. Most of the marked themes are adverbial adjunct, especially temporal and conditional clauses.From the perspectives of register theory, the paper finds that in terms of the variable-field, what is being talked is the structure of the Government and separation of powers among its branches, it's about endowing powers and prescribing rights; in terms of the variable-tenor, the participants of the Constitution are all people, they possess the equal status; in terms of the variable-mode, the Constitution is official and written.For the comparison and diachronic study, the paper finds that the textual features vary slightly in different context of culture, but on the whole the forensic text remains the feature of Uniqueness and Heredity.