A Contrastive Study Of American And Chinese Supreme Court Judgment From The Perspective Of Iconicity

As China has been promoting the judicial reform, the writing and improvement of judgments has entered the vision of scholars and forensic linguists. At present, most previous contrastive researches on languages of American and Chinese judgments remain in some special expressions and functions, or concentrate on the different components of each judgment attributed to. But as the public legal document, the drafting of judgment should necessarily consider the public acceptance, persuasion and the strict logic.Iconicity theory which reveals the mapping relations between language forms and their meanings, can provide a new theoretical framework for the study in the languages of American and Chinese judgments. From the perspective of iconicity, this thesis chooses ten public judgments from the Supreme People's Court of PRC and the Supreme Court of the United States to conduct a contrastive study aiming to analyze how language tend to achieve the features and effects of judgments, and find out the reasons for similarities and differences between the languages used in American and Chinese Supreme Court judgments.After the analysis of the syntax and discourse in judgments of American and Chinese Supreme Courts on the basis of the four principles of iconicity, it could be found that: 1. Both judgments largely use sequence iconicity at syntactical level to recapture the occurrence of the case and the process of legal procedures. In the meantime, syntax with different logical sequence, distance and quantity iconicity enhances the persuasion and readability of judgment; 2. At the discoursal level, American and Chinese judgments both apply sequence, distance, quantity and markedness principle to emphasize related information on varied degrees which enhance public comprehension and acceptance, and improve the coherence and logic of the discourse; 3. The differences between American and Chinese judgments mainly lie in that Chinese judgments apply some simple and fixed principles of iconicity, for instance, large using of temporal sequence iconicity and repetition in quantity iconicity at both syntactical and discoursal levels. While in American judgments, multiple principles of iconicity are applied flexibly to enrich the diversity of syntax which makes the whole discourse more appropriate; 4. The reasons for those differences lie in the grammatical distinction between English and Chinese languages, especially the syntactical restriction. Besides, such differences also cite as the cause of the variety of the two legal systems on disparity of judge powers and relied information for the ruling.