A Contrastive Study Of Heteroglossic Engagement Resources In American And Chinese Judgments

Judicial judgment is the main information carrier of all judicial adjudication activities. It directly reflects not only the level of judicial trial, but also the judicial concepts and way of law enforcement in reality, which is closely related with judicial justice. Previous studies are mainly confined to the legal field while from linguistic perspective; the relevant researches are concerned with their macrostructures, communicative purposes, their intertextual nature, and uses of modality. These different perspectives are helpful for us to better understand this genre. But the fact that different stances of this particular genre interact with each other is neglected in the previous studies, and judgments are not just a simple writing process. This thesis is intended to explore the heteroglossic features in American and Chinese judgments based on Martin and White’s Appraisal Theory, focusing on the engagement subsystem.Appraisal Theory is a lexico-grammatical framework to explore interpersonal meaning developed from Systemic Functional Linguistics. Engagement, as one of the three subsystems of Appraisal Theory,"is concerned with the linguistic resources by which speakers/writers adopt a stance towards the value positions being referenced by the text and with respect to those they address". This thesis concentrates on the engagement subsystem in American and Chinese judgments aiming at finding out what engagement strategies are favored by American and Chinese judges, and how those strategies affect on the judges’alignment with or disalignment from relevant participants, and what similar or different engagement features appear in American and Chinese judgments and the possible reasons behind them.Five American judgments from http://lp.findlaw.com and five Chinese judgments from http://ipr.court.gov.cn are collected for the study. Both quantitative and qualitative analyses are employed. The quantitative approach with the help of UAM CorpusTool2.8.12is adopted to analyze the frequencies and distribution of engagement resources appeared in the collected data while the qualitative method is used for the detailed analysis of discourse, which is significant to understand how judges deploy engagement resources to express their stances with respect to the contrary voices. Based on the quantitative and qualitative analyses, we get the major findings as follows:Both American and Chinese judges use all the heteroglossic engagement resources, and they have selected the subsystem in a similar way:they both prefer disclaim resources to proclaim ones within the contract type. As for the subsystem of disclaim, American and Chinese judges tend to employ more deny resources than counter ones. Under proclaim, they both like pronounce resources best. American and Chinese judges also both prefer attribute values to entertain ones within the expand type. In addition, American and Chinese judges favor acknowledge resources than distance ones within attribute. However, Chinese judges prefer to employ more contract resources while American judges like expand resources better. After the thorough analyses, it is thought that American and Chinese judgments are within the same genre and have similar communicative purposes; however, America and China belong to different legal systems and judges play different roles, which will inevitably lead to the similarities and differences in their engaging strategies.This thesis studies the heteroglossia in American and Chinese judgments within the Appraisal Theory, providing another perspective to study interpersonal meanings and serving as a tentative way for exploring the heteroglossia characteristics in other kinds of discourses. It is also hoped that the present study can enrich the linguistic research on judicial language and shed some light upon the drafting and understanding of the court judgments.