The Textual Function Of English Intellectual Property Texts

With the explosion of knowledge, there are some intangible assets to flood in modern society, such as discoveries and inventions; musical, artistic, and literary works;and words, phrases, designs, and symbols. On the other hand, the flourish of Internet boosts the overwhelming speed of dissemination of information. It is more likely that these intangible assets are liable to be used by illegal intruder. Subsequently, some legislations and regulations about Intellectual Property are gradually drafted to maintain them.In the present paper, the four texts are taken as the data from English Intellectual Property texts, such as Copyright Law of the United States of America(1994),Consolidated Patent Laws(2007), Trademark Law Treaty(1994), and Universal Copyright Convention(1971). This paper, from functional stylistics perspective, is to analyze textual function of four English Intellectual Property texts on basis of Halliday and Hasan’s cohesive theory and Halliday’s thematic theory.According to the four legal texts, this study is to explore three cohesive devices and three theme structures, which draws some conclusions as follows:(1) For cohesive device, in grammatical cohesion, demonstrative reference and comparative reference occur frequently. In personal reference, the third personal reference is usually used to embody objectivity and fairness of the legal language.Conjunction is used more frequently, which makes the whole texts more logic and coherent. Substitution is rare in the four texts, because it tends to cause some ambiguity.This phenomenon can also make legal texts more exact and strict. As to lexical cohesion,reiteration and collocation are very common to make the legal texts more coherent.Semantic cohesion makes the whole texts coherent through the meanings of every word and every sentence.(2) For theme structures, simple theme is the most obvious. The ‘heavy’ subject and adjunct as theme occur most frequently. It indicates the regularity, completeness and comprehensiveness of legal texts. However, complement as theme is never used,because the position of complement tends to confuse the readers. Clausal theme appearsmore frequently. Legal texts prefer providing some premises, such as time, place, way or condition, so as to make them unassailable. Multiple theme is less common,especially interpersonal element, in that the legal texts are drafted without any personal emotions, attitudes and assessments.This study helps to have a further comprehension of these laws, especially teaching of legal texts in law schools to popularize knowledge of related laws; to perfect legal system and put the policy of “rule by law” into practice, and to translate between Chinese and English.