An Analysis Of The Textual Features Of English And Chinese Legal Discourse From The Perspective Of Thematic Progression

The Theme-Rheme theory originated from Communicative Dynamism ofPrague School and was developed by linguists of Systemic Functional Grammar, withHalliday as their representative. Halliday’s thematic theory and Danes’ theory onthematic progression have become important methods for discourse analysis. After thetheory was introduced into legal discourse analysis, the scope of linguistic study wasgreatly expanded.The present thesis aims to study the textural features of English and Chineselegal discourses from the perspective of thematic progression on the basis of bothquantitative analysis and qualitative analysis. The study analyzes English and Chineselegal discourse in textural analysis level from the perspective aspect of thematicprogression and employs software to identify and analyze the samples in the corpus.The thesis attempts to answer the following three questions:1. What are the distinctive Theme and TP patterns in English and Chinese legaldiscourses and their translations?2. Are there any similarities and differences between the English and Chineselegal discourses with regard to Theme/Rheme and TP patterns?3. If there are some significant differences, what causes these differences?The Chinese sample tests are selected from Pool of Bilingual Parallel Corporaof Chinese Classics of Shaoxing University, and the English samples are downloadedfrom the websites, which are published publicly on the magazines. Frequencycalculating and statistical analysis were carried out with the tools of Notepad++andSPSS.After all the analyses we have got the following findings:From the structural-cohesion aspect, as far as the types of thematic progressionpattern are concerned, two types, parallel pattern and continuous pattern, are taking ahigh proportion both in English and Chinese legal discourses. The statistic resultsshow that English legal discourses employ more parallel patterns than other ones and Chinese ones select continuous pattern more often. In addition, there are more TextualTheme and fewer Interpersonal Theme in English and Chinese legal discourses.From the non-structural cohesion aspect, there are more references,conjunctions and lexical cohesions in both English and Chinese legal discourses andfewer substitutions and ellipsis. Personal reference isn’t generally preferred inChinese legislative text, which is rarely used because the language of law ispreoccupied with extremely accurate and objective words in order to reduceuncertainty. The cohesive effect is achieved by using a variety of conjunctives, whichjoin different components of a discourse. Therefore, in legislative ones, the varietiesof conjunction are used. Frequent use of repetition can make the discourse verboseand reduce its readability, but it lay stress on the important term and ensures theextreme accuracy and certainty of the meaning of the sentence.With research findings listed above, the present thesis is expected to offerfollowing implications:On the one hand, theoretically speaking, a framework for translation qualityassessment was established in present research and may be used in similar studieslater for reference. Besides, a linguistic theory was introduced to analyze cohesion ofEnglish and Chinese legal discourses in present thesis, which helps to broaden thescope for future research.On the other hand, in practice, for those who engage in foreign legal service andinternational trade, the results in this thesis also provide much help. They can benefitfrom the mastery of characteristic of English and Chinese legal discourse, especiallywhen translating and understanding the legal documents.