A Contrastive Study Of Speech Acts In International Conventions And British Domestic Statutes

As the largest and main sources of international law, international conventions play an extremely important role in international communication. Generally, international conventions are categorized into legislative language. However, due to their differences from domestic statutes in terms of legislator, legal subject and binding force, international conventions must bear something different from internal law in linguistic form.The author of the present study, taking international conventions on intellectual property rights protection and corresponding British domestic statutes as objects, tries to explore whether the use of speech acts in conventions is distinct from that in domestic statutes from the perspective of pragmatics.This thesis is roughly divided into two major parts. The first part, consisting of the first three chapters, mainly expounds the research background and theoretical frame of the study. Chapter One introduces the rationale, the purpose, the methodology and the organization of this dissertation. In Chapter Two, the author generally elaborates the basic situation of international convention from two perspectives. From the perspectives of law, international convention as a kind of "weak law" has its unique features. From the perspectives of linguistics, the research related to international convention seldom involves linguistic features of international conventions. Chapter Three overviews the development of speech act theory and mainly reviews previous studies on legal and legislative speech acts at home and abroad, which lay the theoretical and methodological foundation for the present study.The second part, Chapter Four and Chapter Five, is the core part of this dissertation and narrates the main point and method of the research. Based on the identification and classification of materialization and illocutionary forces of legislative speech acts discussed in part one, the author respectively describes and analyzes the use of legislative speech acts in the two groups of selected data—three international intellectual property rights protection conventions and three domestic statutes of UK concerning intellectual property rights protection, and thus summarizes the features in realization of legislative speech acts and distribution of illocutionary forces in these two groups of laws. By conducting a contrastive study, the author finds that international conventions and British domestic statutes, with the common function as legislative texts, share some features in the use of legislative speech acts. However, differences exist in the aspects of materialization types, strategy choices and illocutionary forces. To further confirm the results, the author conducts an Independent Samples Test in order to examine whether significant differences exist between two groups of foregoing data by employing SPSS statistics software, and finds that significant differences exist in several aspects, especially in the terms of permissions and obligations. Therefore, a conclusion can be drawn that international conventions indeed bear something different from domestic statutes in linguistic form, namely in the use of speech acts. The author of the present study hopes this discovery can be helpful in transforming international conventions into domestic statutes.