| As a phrase structure, de construction is frequently used in modern Mandarin Chinese. The researches on it have attracted much interest and given rise to heated discussion. And the previous researchers have yielded fruitful results on it. To sum up, the researches on de construction can be divided into three groups: the traditional syntactic research, the formal grammatical research and the cognitive research. Besides, it is pointed out that the objective of the previous researches is de construction in daily language and literature works. Nevertheless, there are few researches that study de construction in legislative texts. Through the investigation, it is found that de construction also frequently appears in legislative texts and it has become an important and particular structure in legislative texts. By using the corpus-based method, this study makes an attempt to analyze de construction in legislative texts. And there are three questions to be discussed:① What are the structural characteristics of de construction in legislative texts?② What are the semantic characteristics of de construction in legislative texts?③ What are the pragmatic functions of de construction in legislative texts?Due to the large number of laws in China, it is impossible for the researcher to take all legislative texts as the corpus. Therefore, this study draws 15 samples from 10 kinds of legislative texts by group sampling. The corpus contains about 296,000 words. De constructions in legislative are picked out via Microsoft word 2003 and the ones that are inapplicable to the present study are discarded. The aim of language researches is to better understand the language. This study conducts a descriptive research. By using the combination of descriptive and explanatory methods, the present author tries to analyze and discuss the structural characteristics, semantic traits and pragmatic functions of de construction in legislative texts.Through the analysis and discussion, this study has come to the following findings: 1) de constructions are presented in different structural types; de construction uses coordinate structures; in order to make the expressions concisely and precisely, the repetitive expressions are often used, such as the repetitive formation and the repeat of the whole construction. 2) De construction in legislative texts has three semantic characteristics: owning the neutral semantic prosody, referring to indefinite objects or people and storing a lot of information. 3) De constructions in legislative texts takes on four pragmatic functions: the classifying function, the function of achieving coherence, the hypothetical function and the function of expressing vagueness.This study is hoped to shed some light on the translation and the improvement of legislative texts. Having a better understanding of the structural, semantic traits and pragmatic functions of de construction, we can translate the legislative texts more precisely and concisely. |
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