A Brief Study On Metafunction Of Legal English

Systemic-functional grammar has been introduced into China in the late1990s, great enthusiasm in the study of it has been stimulated, which in return speeds up the development of it.Systemic-functional grammar includes two parts:systemic grammar and functional grammar. In this thesis, the latter one is adopted as the theoretical framework,in which, three metafunctions (interperonal, ideational and textual) and their sub-systemic functions(mood, transitivity, theme-rheme, etc) were introduced. The applications of three metafunctions involve advertising English, the novel and so on. Meanwhile, the sub-system, such as transitivity, theme-rheme structure and cohesion are applied in political, news English..From the perspective of linguistics, legal English,like the language of science and technology, business and medical terminology,belongs to the stylistic variants, or more precisely, is a kind of jargon. So legal English belongs to the English with specific purposes (ESP).In the previous studies on legal English, it is relatively common to carry on research in the fields of morphology, syntax or corpus linguistics, but few studies are carried out from the perspective of functional grammar. This thesis attempts to analyze legal English from a new point of view-functional grammar. To be specific, it tends to explore the application of the three metafunctions (interperonal, ideational and textual) and their sub-systemic functions in legal English and find out the characteristics of legal English clause.Because there are so many types of legal English, this thesis will take one of them as an example, that is, the American Federal Tax Law. As there are many branches in the American Federal Tax Law,the thesis will choose income tax law, estate and gift tax, employment tax law. as the main sources for analysis. In the research, it adopts equidistant sampling method to draw examples, and uses quantitative and qualitative analysis methods to analyse. It turns out to achieve the effect of the organic combination of theory and examples, and provides an effective means to study clause in legal English.After the analysis, we can find out the features of federal tax law. About ideational metafunction, transitivity is the main sub-system. Federal tax law prefers to use material and relational process.About textual metafunction, there are much more multiple themes and less simple themes in federal tax law. In multiple themes, the textual components occur more frequently, meanwhile there are few interpersonal themes.And,the constituents as themes are concerned, in the first place, in federal tax law more noun or noun phrases are adopted as themes,while pronouns are less used. About interpersonal metafunction, in federal tax law,"shall" and "may" are the most frequency modal operators.