| Previous research on legal language has centered almost exclusively on syntactic and lexical features, but rarely on pragmatic aspects in written legal discourse. Based on Austin and Searle's theory of illocutionary act, this thesis intends to study language used in legal speech acts in Chinese and English legislative texts.Legal speech acts are different from those used in everyday discourses in that they carry legal force. Their primary pragmatic function is to regulate the social behavior of citizens and the relationship between them. The paper aims to analyze the linguistic realization patterns of regulative legal performatives for setting out obligations, permissions, and prohibitions in Chinese and English Legislative discourse. It focuses on the illocutionary forces of obligation, prohibition, and permission in legislative text and the performative modal verbs used to represent these forces in the legislation of English and Chinese. It first reviews illocutionary forces of speech acts in legal English, then describes legal performative modal verbs used in legal Chinese in ways equivalent to the English'shall','may'and'may not'or'shall not'for the illocutionary forces of setting out obligations, permissions, and prohibitions. From the analysis of the performative expressions used in legal speech acts in Chinese and English legislative texts, the study points to a universalism in the illocutionary functions of legal language and the tendency to use performatives in legal texts and to use fossilized words across different languages.Apart from Introduction and Conclusion, the entire thesis consists of four chapters .The Introduction presents the theme and structure of the thesis.Chapter One provides an introduction to law, legal language and legislative language. Chapter Two is the literature review on speech act theory, and a review of previous study on legal speech act both at home and abroad. The main part of the thesis is chapter Three which discusses illocutionary forces in legislative texts and corresponding linguistic forms in legal English, and particularly describes the legal performative modal verbs used to represent these forces of setting out obligations, permissions and prohibitions in the legislation of China. Then it discusses some implications of the analysis of the performative expressions used in Chinese and English legislative language. And the results of the study lay a foundation for legal translation. Chapter Four proves that the results of analysis are applicable to C-E legal translation. The writer reminds that in legal translation the translator needs to consider how to achieve illocutionary equivalence between source text and target text, because the purpose of legal text is to direct people's behavior, not purely to convey information. The last part is the Conclusion in which the enlightenment of the research is expounded. |
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