The Preliminary Study Of The Speech Acts In The Penal Code

Language is a special tool of human being to express meanings and exchange ideas. When people use different types of speech such as statement, command, threat, instigation, incitement, lure to carry on a special communicative intent, they are also completing a kind of behavior actually. This kind of behavior is called speech acts. These related actions in our country's penal code can be made by the perpetrator in oral manner. It can be a kind of efficient and convenient communicative tool for oneself to achieve his purpose. It can also become a kind of inducement that disobeys discipline and breaks the law, thus he violates systems and laws and will be punished by law. This kind of action composed of speech that has the pertaining meaning to criminal law is called speech acts in the penal code. To be explained, in addition to the execution acts as threat, instigation, lure and introduction, this kind of speech acts include such the non-execution acts as organization and instigation and assistance, etc. The execution acts, which are the most representative, are selected to study in the text. At the same time, speech acts that are significant in the research of criminal law and can be evaluated by it such as confession and surrender actions are mentioned.The speech acts of broad sense in the criminal law have characters of"body-activity character"and"intention character"as perpetrator's characters. The speech acts of narrow sense have the perpetrator's"harm character"in addition. Besides, they have three specific characters. One is"certainty of using language", one is"oracy of expressing"and one is"other humanity of targeting". The speech acts in complete meaning consists of three essential elements of"the sense act of speech","the illocutionary act of speech"and"the perlocutionary act of speech". The three elements are also three basic stages in a speech act's formation. The stage"illocutionary act of speech"among them accompanies with two main factors:"utterance of speech"and"diction of speech". The former is the exterior factor of the speech acts; the latter and"the sense act of speech"are its internal factors."The illocutionary act of speech"and"the perlocutionary act of speech"are law factors of the speech acts. The speech acts can be expressed as execution speech acts in the penal code and non-execution speech acts, etc, at the same time, they are embodied by free press and surrender prescribed in the penal code. The speech acts can be decomposed into broad sense and narrow sense ones; direct and indirect ones; intentional and negligent ones; instant and continuant ones, etc. in the academic theory. Their forms of crime such as accomplishment, preparation, non-accomplishment and pause have special features of their own.It is an experimental research to introduce the speech-act theory into the criminal law realm and explore the significance of speech acts. It's an attempted research. This can expand the range of research in law linguistics and attract the attention and promote the research of perpetrator linguistics. At the same time, it has the significance to cognize crime or not, felony or misdemeanour and perpetrators'personal fatalness in justice practice to a certain extent.