Leeways In Legal Discourse

The present study, belonging to the scope of forensic linguistics, has centered its attention on the existence of leeways in legal discourse, with the purpose of exploiting genre theory and genre analysis to analyze the language of legal academic profession. Leeway in the present study refers to room for the creative interpretation in the legal profession. As one unique type of discourse, legal discourse has some important political, social, cultural and economical features. Legal discourse is a genre. It is highly structured and conventionalized with constraints. Since genre theory emphasizes communicative purposes and the exploitation of constraints by discourse community members to achieve aims, it becomes our first choice as the conceptual framework. Three levels of genre analysis are included in the research model for the analysis of leeways in legal discourse, they are linguistic analysis, sociological analysis, and psychological analysis, In the study, Chinese data were selected and analyzed from the three levels of genre analysis. Each part of the study was categorized and analyzed through genre analysis according to the specific characteristics of legal discourse, such as subjective terms, initial case description, judicial discretion, core meaning and penumbra meaning. It must be pointed out that the research model is formulated within the conceptual framework. This model can be used as a whole and applied to each data separately, or one component of the method will be applied to the whole data. But it is not possible for the whole model to be applied to all data. Such a concrete detailed study of leeways in legal discourse can help solve the problem why legal discourse is written the way it is, why people dispute on the same case, and why judges may come to entirely different conclusions. To sum up, more attention should be paid to leeways in legal discourse, the interests and fate of the ordinary people should be cared about more carefully, and genre theory and genre analysis prove to be effective in illustrating how leeways exist in legal discourse. In spite of some limitations, the present study still has important implications. The study of genre theory and genre analysis in classroom teaching is popular in recent years, however, the corresponding study in legal discourse with the data of Chinese as its object is rare. The work is full of challenge and it has significance. The study indicates that genre theory can be applied to the legal discourse other than classroom teaching. The theoretical framework also proves to be effective in studying leeways in legal discourse. It belps us have a better understanding of the functions and constructions of the law. It must be pointed out that less attention has been given to the notion of genre in the legal discourse. While I was preparing for my thesis, to my best knowledge, I did not see any research in which leeways were analyzed with Chinese data in terms of genre. It is also hoped that this attempt may extend the exploitation of genre theory to the teaching and learning in the field of forensic linguistics.