Genre Analysis Of Chinese Legislative Discourse

The thesis is aimed to analyze Chinese legislative discourse on the grounds of genre theory. Genre analysis and Chinese legislative writing are the two most crucial issues throughout the research.Genre is a term not unfamiliar in ordinary use, and an important notion in discourse analysis drawing the attention of scholars from all language-related disciplines. In a chronical order, this thesis reviews the understandings of non-linguistic schools of Folklore, Literature and Rhetorics towards the concept of genre. Though a universal definition of genre is not arrived at, their perceptions of genre deepen on the basis of the predecessors ranging from "permanent forms","a type, a class, or a category of presentation that shares distinctive and easily identifiable features", to "coded events set within social communicative processes","the means of fulfilling social purposes in certain contexts"Within the linguistic schools touched upon in the thesis, Hasan of Systemic Functional Linguistics defines genre as a class of texts determined by the obligatory elements; in contrast, Australian Systemic Functional linguist Martin defines genre as a level of context, which represents the system of staged goal-oriented social processes through which social subjects in a given culture live their lives; Applied Linguistics(English for Specific Purposes) specifies genre as "a recognizable communicative event characterized by a set of communicative purposes identified and mutually understood by the members of the professional or academic community in which it regularly occurs." This thesis follows Martin and ESP taking genre as staged goal-oriented social processes and integrates Martin’s Register and Genre Theory with Bhatia’s Multiperspective Approach and constructs the Genre Analysis Matrix of the thesis, which consists of Realization Patterns and Reflection Patterns.The Genre Analysis Matrix is the theoretical base on which we conduct our analysis of Chinese legislative writing. It fits into our research purpose of identifying Chinese legislative writing as certain type by means of distinguishing the purpose the text fulfills and the job it does in its culture of origin. The legislative document in research is the1982Constitution of People’s Republic of China. In the levels of lexico-grammar, semantics and register, we get its schematic patterns and realization patterns from the text-internal analysis; in the levels of legislative practices and culture, we interpret the concept of rule of law in the Chinese soil, though it has a deep root in western legal system and we clarify the status and functions of Constitution and law. In the end, we get the purpose of Constitution, which identifies it as the basic law of Chinese legal system,"Constitution unites the leadership of Communist Party of China, interests of the people and the authority of law as one, and guarantees the socialist development with Chinese characteristics".