Cohesion In Legal Texts

Since the 1950s, discourse analysis or text linguistics has become one of the independent subjects in the field of linguistics. As a newly emerging interdisciplinary branch of modern linguistics, it aims at helping people to make up and understand all kinds of coherent discourses. At present, many linguists at home and abroad are paying a good deal of attention to what is going on in this field. Discourse analysis attempts to describe and explain some language phenomena which were largely neglected by traditional language study. More and more linguists have come to realize that language study should not be confined at the sentence level. It must go beyond the sentence bounds and study the functions of sentence groups and paragraphs in discourse. Thus discourse analysis or text linguistics came into being as an independent subject. Linguists found that the real and complete understanding of a text cannot be reached only depending on traditional analysis on sentences and words. It must resort to hyper-syntactic structures like social context and situational context. Legal language is a special and important register in people's life, and this thesis is to make analysis on legal texts. A text should be viewed as an entity rather than a simple compound of sentences or clauses. The focus of research is the cohesive devices used in English and Chinese legal texts.Cohesive devices fall into two categories: grammatical cohesion and lexical cohesion. This thesis is to analyze grammatical cohesive devices and lexical cohesive devices respectively and to generalize some features of these devices used in legal texts.In this thesis, the author studies and discusses cohesive devices used in English and Chinese legal texts in the following structure:Firstly, in Chapter One, the author briefly introduces some relative subjects and the guiding theories in this thesis.Secondly, Chapter Two consists of a brief introduction to the concept "cohesion", and some relative concepts and theories are mentioned and briefly introduced in this chapter.The next two chapters are the main parts of this thesis. They are respectively grammatical cohesion and lexical cohesion in legal texts. Grammatical cohesion and lexical cohesion are two main classes of cohesive devices in texts. In these two chapters, a number of examples of cohesion in both Chinese and English legal texts are used to illustrate the cohesive function of each device. Some translations and contrastive studies are involved for the purpose of researching the cohesion in legal texts.Chapter Five is the last one, drawing some conclusions briefly pursuant to what has been illustrated in previous chapters, mostly focusing on legal texts in both English and Chinese:i. Due to the particularity in style and the complexity in meaning of the legallanguage, the deep semantic can be conveyed only through the use of surfacelinguistic symbols such as cohesion devices.ii. There are some similarities and differences in the cohesive devices in theEnglish and Chinese language, it is important to value both the similarities anddifferences.iii. During the process of research, it has been found that both grammatical cohesionand lexical cohesion are particular in the legal texts, compared to those incommon language.