| Law is playing a more and more significant role in modern society regulating people's behavior,modifying relationship between various statuses and even affecting interaction between countries.Law has an influence on everyone in every corner of our lives.The expression and transmission of law benefit a lot from language and legal language plays an important role in legal process of formulation, interpretation and even enforcement.Sometimes the problem of law is the problem of language;some linguistic means improve law.Law realizes the will of the gerentocratic.As a linguistic vehicle of law,legal language naturally has power and power's realization and exercise can be discovered by linguistic means.Nevertheless,there are not many linguists engaged in studying how legal language displays its power and the relationship between language and power.Legal Chinese is benefiting more and more from comparatively advanced legal English. The recognition of power in legal English helps a lot to study legal English deeply and improve legal Chinese.Bearing these in mind,the author carries out the following study.The study aims to describe linguistic features of legal discourse,explores the interactive relationship between legal language and power and provides an analytical tool for discovering power in legal discourse.Generally,the present thesis can be divided into three parts.The first chapter is part one focused on the necessity of the legal discourse studies and on the organization of the present thesis.As far as data are concerned,the author collects materials both in English and Chinese version from International Economic Law.The second part includes Chapter Two to Chapter Four,providing the theoretical foundation of the present thesis and analyzing the legal discourse in accordance with the four approaches introduced in Chapter Three.Chapter Two explores the relationship of power,language and law,and studies the influence of legal culture upon power consciousness inherent in legal language.Law's power can be understood by means of law's language and power is not the substance away from us but the one in our everyday reality.However,different legal culture leads to different recognition of power.The author then describes the characteristics of both western and Chinese legal culture and points out that despite of cultural differences, their legal languages both legalize the power.Law is series of formalized codes of power.After showing the concepts and interactive relationships among legal culture, legal language and power consciousness,Chapter Three focuses on theories of Discourse Analysis(DA),Critical Discourse Analysis(CDA),and Systemic Functional Grammar(SFG).Discourse analysis achieves two contributions:the understanding of the discourse and the evaluation of the discourse.That is,the linguistic analysis enables one not only to show how and why the discourse means what it does,but also to say why the discourse is,or is not,an effective discourse for its own purposes.Two perspectives are presented:CDA and SFG.There are three major issues involved in Critical Discourse Analysis:Ideology,Power and Social Situation.Fowler and Fairclough attempt to explore the ideologies or value systems residing in discourses.They are concerned with the situations which involve power relations between individuals.Another perspective lies in functions of language, where three metafunctions are involved.Ideational function or meaning is analyzed via experiential and logical functions;interpersonal function is analyzed through mood,modality;textual function is analyzed in thematic structure,information structure,cohesion,and so on.The author combines the two perspectives together to put forward a Critical-Functional approach and concludes the chapter with four approaches to analyzing legal discourse.The concepts of the four approaches--logical structure,modality,cohesion and genre--are selected and explained respectively in the end of the chapter.Chapter Four is the empirical part where the author applies the approach discussed in Chapter Three to discover how power is realized in legal discourse. Four approaches are analyzed with many examples from the materials the author selects from International Economical Law.The data are collected and analyzed at the end of the first two sections of the chapter.The other two approaches(cohesion and genre) are also exemplified and analyzed at great length.Based on these results of data collection and specific analysis,it is concluded that in order to show the authority,objectivity,formality,precision and all-inclusiveness,drafters are selective in using language and they apply complex logical structures with many embedded sentences and dominant clauses,high-valued modal words,professional and uniform framework and so on to mystify the power of the dominant party and increase the power of legal language.The relationship between language and power is interactive: language shows power and power selects language.Chapter Five provides the last part of the study,in which the author generalizes the power realization of legal discourse based on the studies of the previous chapters and holds that the study has enriched the field of critical discourse analysis by introducing legal discourse to it.With the attempt,the author gives two suggestions for further study.
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