Study On The Intertextuality Of Legislative Texts

In order to strengthen the Chinese legal construction and meet the needs of theinternational development, it’s highly necessary to make some researches on the forensiclinguistics. It’s well known that the legislative texts have always been regarded as thecornerstone of the laws and regulations, so the significance of the relative research couldn’t beunderestimated. In earlier times, the intertextuality theory was used for the literary criticalresearch. In1981, Beaugrande and Dressler applied this theory into the textual linguistics,which offers a new perspective for the texts research. Therefore, this thesis tries to study theintertextuality of the legislative texts.The concept of the intertextuality was firstly proposed by French semiologist Julia Kristevain1966. She views that any text is the product of absorbing and transforming other texts. Underthe guidance of the intertextuality theory, this thesis aims to make a comprehensive analysis ofthe legislative texts from the following two aspects: constitutive intertextuality and manifestintertextuality. The former aspect embodies in the generic intertextuality, structuralintertextuality, thematic intertextuality, and functional intertextuality; and the latter is reflectedin the reference, cliché, conventionalism, and so on. Besides, this thesis also involves thecultural elements to make an analysis on the legislative texts.In addition, for the sake of enriching and highlighting the study implications, this thesischooses the English version of the Contract Law of the People’s Republic of China (abbreviated:CLPRC) as an example and adopts the method of the statistics collection to make a further,specific and detailed research. This thesis also analyzes the application of the intertextuality inthe legislative texts’ C-E translation and discusses the strategies of making the target translationmuch more close to the original expression, which is under the guidance of analyzing theintertextuality of source texts and target texts.Through the above analysis, taking the English version of CLPRC as a representative, thispaper reveals that: at the cultural intertextuality level, different legislative texts have their owndistinctions because of their different culture texts; at the constitutive intertextuality level, some legislative texts not only inherit the traditional legislative texts, but also borrow other fields’relevant texts from the aspects of the genre, theme, structure, and function; at the manifest level,the reference, cliché and conventionalism approaches’ usage not only make the legislative textsintertwined together, but also gradually evolve into the unique characteristics, which coulddistinguish other texts. Eventually, based on these above detailed analyses, this thesis expects toprovide some implications and references for the theoretical and methodological studies of thelegislative texts, even for other legal texts.