Contrastive Analysis Of Chinese And American Court Judgments From The Perspective Of Intertextuality

The present thesis is a comparative analysis of intertextuality in Chinese and American court judgments. Intertextuality is one of the important properties that every text or discourse has. Through literature review, it is found that there are not comparative studies on Chinese and American court judgments from the perspective of intertextuality. The thesis aims to find out the linguistic features in Chinese and American court judgments by means of investigating intertextuality in these court judgments, thus discovering the power relation between the judge and the litigants in Chinese and American courts.In the light of Xin Bin(2000b)'s classification of specific and generic intertextuality from the perspective of critical discourse analysis, through the data collection and statistic analysis, the thesis introduces the concrete intertextual devices used in the data so as to compare and figure out similarities and differences in the use of those intertextuality hidden in Chinese and American court judgments as well as what kind of power relations between the judges and the litigants can be revealed.Detailed analysis reflects that there are three main intertextual devices used in Chinese and American court judgments, i.e. cliche, reference and quotation. Although cliches are mostly used in both Chinese and American court judgments, the frequency used in Chinese ones is higher than that in American ones, which reveals there exist the asymmetric power relations between the judges and the litigants in two countries, but Chinese ones are more highly ritualized than American ones. It is also found that there are a few differences in quoting sources, quotation types and quoting verbs between Chinese and American court judgments. Even though genres are blended in both Chinese and American ones, Chinese one has strict structure requirements, the judges in China always narrate the case from the aspect of the court, the accuser and the accused one by one to expound and argue the rationality and legality of the decision so they need make use of different genres at different segments while American one does not have strict structure requirements, which is just like a big whole argumentative writing that consists of several small argumentative writings, and simultaneously American judges narrate the participants' legal actions according to the chronological order. Meanwhile, although the judges in two countries take different subject positions, both of them constantly change the subject position to realize the legal functions. In general, there exists the asymmetric power relation between the judges and the litigants in both Chinese and American courts, for example, the judge owns and wields more power than the litigants. However, the judge in China plays an active role while the judge in American plays a passive role during the judicial process due to their own different legal system and legal culture. What's more, power relation between the judge and the litigants in China seems to be more hierarchical than those in America while power relation between the judge and the litigants in America tends to be relatively equal.