| The reform and opening up bring China’s society to a transitional period of rapid development, socialist market economy comes into being and gradually develops, and social productive forces get rapid development. Also, they bring a series of new social problems and contradictions, which are difficult for traditional legal departments to handle, so social law is inevitably needed. Especially in the1990s, Chinese-foreign contractual enterprises, Chinese-foreign joint ventures, wholly foreign-owned enterprises and transnational co-operations enter the Chinese market one after one, making social problems and contradictions more diverse and complicated. The research of the English version of Social Law of People’s Republic of China (hereinafter referred to as SLPRC) in the1990s is particularly important in the multi-level and wide-range international development of SLPRC. The usage of non-finite verbs is one of the most prominent characteristics of legal English. Therefore, it is well worth analyzing the distribution of non-finite verbs and the features of their syntactic functions in the English version of SLPRC in the1990s.This thesis establishes a small-scaled monolingual corpus constituted by ten independent legal texts by collecting laws and regulations concerned with SLPRC in the1990s. Based on the study of the English version of SLPRC, this thesis respectively observes and analyzes, under the framework of Nida’s functional equivalence, combining quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis, using the online part of speech tagger which tags the raw corpus of SLPRC in the1990s and running Antconc software which conducts item concordances, the overall distribution of non-finite verbs, the distributions of each form of non-finite verbs—infinitives, past participles, gerunds and present participles, the features of their structures, the lexical collocations, syntactic functions and so on.The results present that:Firstly, the use of non-finite verbs is highlighted in the version of SLPRC in the1990s. Of all the non-finite verbs, infinitives occur most frequently, of which infinitive forms of lexical verbs occupy68.8%. The high diversity of main verbs in the English version of SLPRC in the1990s proves that the legal texts of SLPRC cover a large amount of information, broad fields and complicated problems. Secondly, past participles are, wit in the1990s h a proportion of49.8%, mainly together with the "be-verbs" to form the passive patterns, which can avoid making subjective or partial expressions and make more objective statements of laws and regulations of SLPRC in the1990s. Similarly, past participles often collocates the nouns or nominal phrases, serving as their pre-modifiers or post-modifiers, which helps make more accurate expressions of the meanings of legal texts of SLPRC in the1990s. Thirdly, gerunds also appear frequently in English legal texts of SLPRC in the1990s working with different prepositions to convey distinct meanings, which makes English legal texts more abstract and generalized. Finally, present participles are characterized most typically by collocating the nouns or nominal phrases, serving more as their modifiers. In a word, non-finite verbs are not bound by the subject, and nor are they controlled in terms of tense, time and modality. In many cases, the English version of legal texts is in favor of the application of non-finite verbs or their phrases instead of attributive clauses, adverbial clauses and so on, which is consistent with customary English expressions, also presents compactness in the structures of legal English and rigorousness and closeness in logic relations. This is fully realized in the English version of legal texts of SLPRC in the1990s.Therefore, the author holds that the in-depth research of the application of non-finite verbs in the English version contributes to a better understanding of the legal text peculiarities for the purposes of effective translating of law, improving the quality of translation, and also promoting the internationalization of SLPRC in the1990s. |
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