A RST-based Analysis On Chinese Criminal Judgments

Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST), which describes natural texts and characterizes their structure in terms of relations that hold between parts of the texts, was initiated by American scholar William C. Mann and Sandra A. Thompson in 1983. Since then, RST has undergone some changes and a host of researches have been done under this theory.At present, most of the discourse analyses on the basis of RST are done within certain types of discourses, such as public speeches, news commentary, academic theses, while there are rare researches are done in the domain of forensics by adopting RST. Therefore, a rhetorical structural analysis of court judgments can be regarded as a new try in terms of the application of RST.This thesis will apply RST as the theatrical model to identify the hierarchic structure in 30 chosen Chinese criminal judgments. Besides qualitative method, quantitative method is also employed in this thesis.Therefore, under the assistance of Move-step theory, the author will illustrate how each rhetorical relation distributes in different moves and steps respectively.This thesis is composed by seven chapters. In the first chapter, the author mainly lays out a brief introduction about the whole thesis,including research background, research objectives and so on. The second chapter is the literature review of this thesis, which gives a general picture about the previous studies on court judgments, Move-step theory and RST respectively. After the literature review is the theoretical framework of this thesis. In this chapter, RST and Move-step theory will be elaborated in detail. Then research design which includes research data,research methodology and research procedures, will be presented in Chapter four. Chapter five makes a qualitative study on the linguistic realization about some typical examples under RST. A quantitative analysis is to be made in Chapter six, in which the distribution of each rhetorical relation in different moves will be proposed explicitly. The last chapter concludes the major findings of the thesis, as well as limitations and implications of the thesis.Through analyzing, several findings have been drawn. Firstly,Chinese criminal judgments are abundant of rhetorical relations not only in terms of number but also in terms of type. Secondly, the distribution of rhetorical relations in informative moves and steps differs much from those in expressive moves and steps. Thirdly, some typical rhetorical relations can be regarded as the characteristics of different moves. Last but not least, different rhetorical relations have different functions. Some of them contribute to the coherence of the judgments, while others make the judgments more convincing, logical and authoritative.