Generic Structure And Functional Features Of English Legal Memorandum

English legal memorandum has become a trend and generic study is also a hot issue in linguistics. Some generic knowledge of English legal text is helpful when legal professionals handle their routine communication. The chief aim of the thesis is to investigate the generic structure and functional features of English legal memorandum. To satisfy this aim, the author tries to collect sixty authentic English legal memorandums and adopts the approaches based on Swales and Hasan to explore the moves and the structure levels of the texts. Hasan's Generic Structure Potential is exploited to identify and describe the obligatory and optional components in the texts as well as the sequencing and repetition of the structural elements in the textual organizations. The research also draws on the three metafunctions in Halliday's systemic functional linguistics to find out some linguistic strategies associated with certain moves, which is a complementary part to the methodology of the genre study.Through the analysis, there are five moves and eleven steps identified in the English legal memorandum, they are Heading, Identifying the Issue, Statement of facts, Discussion, and Finis. Identifying the Issue, Discussion, and Finis are obligatory moves. All the moves serve the two main communicative purposes of the legal memorandum:to inform and to persuade. On the other hand, linguistic functional features are found in an amount from the systemic functional perspective, which reveal that memorandum inclines to employ material and relational process; prefer declarative mood, fractional imperative mood, and hardly any exclamative mood; in favor of unmarked with simple nominal groups; clausal theme and theme of nominal group complex followed by long and complicated sentence is another favorable choice of English legal memorandum. The findings of the study are mainly devoted to the guidelines for legal memo writing. Moreover, the author hopes that the study may shed some light on the work of legal professionals and ESP teachers, and help students enhance their English legal memo writing.