Genre Analysis Of Chinese And American Court Verdicts——a Contrastive Study

In recent years, genre analysis gradually becomes an important method of discourse research. The genre analysis is a very effective method, for it can make a further description of the functional characteristics of different language forms. It expanded the discourse analysis from description to explanation, considering not only the language factors, but also the psychological factors and social culture. This kind of analysis can reflect the aim of communication, and illustrate the strategies author used to achieve the goal. The communicative goal decided the existence of the genre, making same kind of discourses have the same genre structure, which affected the structure of textual content and language style.With the economic globalization, there is a more and more closely relationship between China and foreign countries in the world on legal affairs communication. In recent years, the research on legal English has made great progress in style and translation. The court verdicts, the final decision of legal disputes, is an important and common legal document. Through comparative study of the genre of court verdicts, the similarities and differences between China and American can be explored and found, which is an beneficial linguistics exploration and try in the research on the legal discourse.Based on the genre analysis theory, this thesis analyzed the structure of Chinese and American court verdicts by comparing the generic structure of forty samples.This study aims to solve the following questions:1) Is the court verdict a particular style? If so, how is it form this particular genre? 2) the similarities and difference between Chinese court verdicts and American courts verdicts?Conclusions as following:1)There are discernable generic structure in court verdicts. American court verdicts consist of five moves"Identifying the case-Establishing the fact-Arguing the case-Declaring the judgment-Obiter dictum". China court verdicts are made up of five moves"Heading-Facts-Grounds of judgment-Ending ". Each move can be divided into several steps, which have their own function of communication. They interact with each other, and realize the common text communication goal.2)Court verdicts belong to legal English genre, with certain common in the structure, namely, the fact, reason, judgment. But there are also great differences in the judgment, because of the different law system. It leads to the different choice in the move, different percentage of words, and the different strategies to achieve the purpose of communication.