Grammatical Metaphor In The Analysis Of Legal Discourse

The dominant trend of thinking, dictated by logical positivism in the western legal culture holds that the language of law should strictly be that of literal language, presenting facts and opinions with unambiguous and objective language. However, with the rise of relativism both in the scientific and philosophical circles in the modern era, such a way of reasoning is challenged by the constructivist schools of linguists. Based on the previous studies of the metaphoricity of legal discourse, this thesis proposes to unpack judicial decisions, an important discourse type with great influences on our lives and society by Grammatical Metaphor theory proposed by Halliday and complemented by Yan Shiqing-sq et al. The approach adopted in this thesis is a comparative one with an aim at demonstrating the universality of grammatical metaphors and the significance of its discursive functions while exploring the functional similarities and differences of grammatical metaphors in English and Chinese legal discourse.The whole thesis is divided into five parts. Chapter 1 serves as a brief introduction to the topic of this thesis followed by the general framework of the paper. Chapter 2 reviews Halliday's grammatical metaphor theory , its development and contributions by other linguists on the issue. Chapter 3 offers an illustration of the characteristics of judicial decision as well as previous research works done in this register with a suggestion that grammatical metaphors are employed, consciously or unconsciously, as a linguistic device to create the impression of authority and objectivity.Chapter 4 is devoted to the analysis of the collected data and the findings of the comparative study on grammatical metaphor's functions in judicial decisions. Through data analysis, the discursive functions of grammatical metaphor are examined and compared in both the English and Chinese texts. It is found that grammatical metaphor is a generic feature of judicial decisions, a means of judicial manipulation as well as linguistic interpretation, that behind the aureole of professional, objective, authoritative, clear and indisputable verbiage is the arbitrary and controversial side of judicial decisions, and that the above observations stand true for English as well as Chinese verdicts with slight differences in terms of functionalsalience. Chapter 5 offers a brief summary of the whole thesis, some tentative conclusions and suggested topics for future researches.