Study Of Grammatical Metaphor In English Contract Law Discourse

Law plays a significant role in modern society and constructs various aspects of our lives. The language of law not only is the most important instrument for the average lawyer, an interesting area for linguists to conduct research, but also an ideological state apparatuses that affect daily lives of virtually everyone. However, the mandatory power of law is not as tangible as a forceful army is. Then how does the law linguistically display its power through legal language? Bearing this question in mind we carry out the following study.The current study aims to describe linguistic features of English contract law discourse, to explore the stylistic effects and functions of grammatical metaphor in it and to provide a practical reference for analyzing legislative discourse. Following the concept that any choice is a meaningful one in systemic linguistics, we believe that the distinct language phenomena in English contract law not only transfer information, but also can serve as a style marker to engender the foregrounding effect.Based on Halliday's views and classification of grammatical metaphor in 1999, we reclassify the 13 types of grammatical metaphors into four general groups:namely, nominalization, adjectivization, verbalization and Prepositionalization, for the convenience of analytical work. Then the thesis identifies various types of grammatical metaphors in English contract law discourse with plentiful examples. After calculating frequencies of occurrence about each type of grammatical metaphor, we found out that grammatical metaphor is pervasive in English contract law and constitutes a significant role in realizing the stylistic characteristics of the text. Findings also reveal that there is a tendency toward "Thing" concerning the use of grammatical metaphor in this special kind of formal legislative discourse.The study attempts to explore stylistic effects and functions of grammatical metaphor in English contract law discourse in terms of its three metafunctional effects. Our analysis shows that grammatical metaphor has managed to fulfill the purpose of contract law in terms of authoritativeness, objectiveness and compactness. All of them lead to the specialty of legislative discourse and difficulty in comprehension for common people.It is hoped that this study will contribute somewhat to the development of research into legal language and arise people's awareness towards legal texts. The question of how to increase equality and fairness between law experts and laymen and how to make the legislation accessible to the common people is worthy of every citizen's consideration.