Comparative Study On The Speech Act Of Legislation Text Both In China And Western Countries

Law is a kind of regulator in contemporary society; it is a standard that definesdifferent status of people via coercive power of state. It provides specifications andrequirements for social members in a direct way. According to legal procedures andauthorities, state organs engage in a serious of special actions, such as implementing,amending, supplementing and abolishing legal documents as well as approving legalnorm. This kind of special actions can be called legislation, which has a great valueon system building in society. With the rapid development of legal system in China,the effects of lawmaking activities are becoming increasingly outstanding. Legislationtexts are formally enforced by legislature and have a universal binding force forcitizens. At present, a great many of experts both at home and abroad engage inresearching legislation texts. However, these experts do studies mainly from theperspective of translation principles and language features. Although their studiesenrich people’s knowledge about legislation texts both at home and abroad and have agreat influence on building legal system society, it is unavoidable to find the limitsonly from the viewpoint of language forms and translation aspects to study thedifferences of legislation texts both at home and abroad. Therefore, it is necessary toanalyze the legislation texts both at home and abroad based on the pragmatics theory,meanwhile, making language use as the research object to explore the differences andpragmatic functions between Chinese legislation text and foreign legislation text.Speech Act Theory is the basic theory on studying language use. Some scholars like Austin and Searle change the focal point from the structure of sentences to themeaning, intention and function of sentences, which gives the prominence to thesocial function of language.“Discourse Analysis” was initially put forward by Harris(1952), American structuralism linguistics. According to Harris, discourse isconsidered a combination of sentences that can be analyzed through distribution,attribution and other structural ways. He tried to define the coordination of sentencesand reveal the disciplines of grammar in sentences. Habermas (1981) divides the legalspeech act into regulatives, expressives and constatives.This paper firstly analyzes the language characteristics of legal texts both athome and abroad. Taking the Chinese Constitution and American Constitution forexample, accuracy, solemnity and plainness are the main factors in ChineseConstitution, the similarly pattern is found in the American Constitution. Based onthis study, this paper makes a detailed analysis of two constitutions from the preamblepart and body part. In the preamble part, Chinese Constitution pays more attention ondeclarations act, commissives act and assertives act, the American Constitution,however, only uses one sentence to display the commissive act. In the body part,commissives act, directives act and declaration act are the major acts in ChineseConstitution while the commissives part is not verified in the body part of AmericanConstitution. In a word, it can be found that there exist a lot of differences because ofthe disparity in culture, conception and system.This paper aims to reveal the importance of speech act theory in Constitutiontext, which is helpful in bettering understanding this kind of texts. Meanwhile, it isimportant to study legislation text form the viewpoint of speech act theory.