A Critical Discourse Analysis Of Power In Chinese Judgments

The present thesis is a critical analysis of power in Chinese judgments. It aims to trace the main linguistic manifestations of power asymmetries in the language of Chinese judgments and investigate how the unequal power relations between the judges and the litigants are enacted in social context.Based on Fairclough's three-dimensional model, we analyze power in judgments at three different levels, namely, description, interpretation and explanation. The fist level centers on the formal features of the text, while the next focuses on the relationship between text and interaction, and the last one deals with the relationship of discourse to process of struggle and to power relations. At the level of description, we analyze the formal features of the text of the judgments in terms of vocabulary, grammar, and textual structure, and found out that address forms, formal words, nominalization, modality, imperatives and ellipsis are the main linguistic manifestations of power asymmetries between the judges and the litigants. The detailed analysis at the levels of interpretation and explanation also reveals that the interpretation of the situational context by the judges and litigants manifests to a certain extent the encoding unequal power relations, and such social structure of power relations help shape the discourse of judgment, and the discourse itself reinforce the enactment of the power relations.The present study may contribute to the linguistic research on judicial language and may help legal laypersons to have critical understandings of judgments. It is also hoped that it may provide legal professions with new insights into the drafting of judgments at the time of legal reform nowadays.