Cohesion In The Chinese Legislative Text

This paper attempts to unravel a particular discourse feature - cohesion in the Chinese legislative text. The author adopts the cohesion modal developed by Halliday and Hasan, which is, reference, ellipsis and substitution, conjunction, and lexical cohesion. By reviewing a wide range of literature in the field of language and the law, the author stresses the importance of textual cohesion in the Chinese legislative text and argues that it deserves the attention of linguists, legal draftsmen, legal translators, and other social scientists working in this area. The data analyzed are selected from diverse branches of the Chinese law. The author concludes, largely due to the unique nature of Chinese legislative text, which is, explicit, precise and unambiguous on the one hand while all-inclusive on the other, the textual cohesion in legislative provisions in China is characterized by a number of distinguishing features. The writer continues to point out that a proper understanding of these distinctiveness of cohesion in the Chinese legislative text is significant to social scientists in the field of language and the law, for they might improve the discourse quality of their work with it.