The Illocutionary Force Of Legal Publicity Documents And Its Influence On The Legal Cognition Of New Generation Migrant Workers

Ever since 1986,Chinese government has carried out 6 five-year plan for legal publicity and education.As a result,the thoughts of democratic legal system and the basic laws as well as the regulations of the Constitution have been well publicized among the people.This five-year plan also prompts rule of law as a fundamental strategy of China.But in practice,the legal publicity and education for the migrant workers has become a bottleneck of this project.Migrant workers are the members of an emerging group in Chinese urbanization.They contribute a great deal to the economic development of the cities and to narrowing the urban-rural gap.But meanwhile,they also bring problems to the cities due to their low legal cognitive level.On the one hand,their lawful rights have often been violated before they know it and on the other hand,they also commit lots of crimes every year in the cities.Most of the crimes are done by the New Generation Migrant Workers,who makes up 60% of the total population of migrant workers.So enhancing the legal publicity and education to the New Generation Migrant Workers is vital to the stability of the society.During the fifth five-year plan for legal publicity and education,the migrant workers as a social group was listed as the major target of this plan for the first time.Ever since then,specialists from all walks of life have turned their eyes to the legal education of this special group of people.But they mainly focus on how to use external resources to carry out this work.For example,they discussed the forms of legal education and the performance of the legal practitioners.In fact,no matter how the form of legal publicity and education changes,the mission will ultimately be done through the language.And the legal documents issued by the government are the main references for all the legal publicity and education methods.But there have been few studies on the language till now.This paper studies how to improve the legal cognition of new generation of the migrant workers by revising the language used in the legal publicity and education documents.First of all this paper analyzes the linguistic characteristic of thedocuments and points out the reason why the legal publicity and education work didn't go well on the migrant workers with reference to their legal cognition.The power of the legal publicity and education language is its illocutionary force,which can change the cognition of the migrant workers.So the good result of the legal publicity and education work lies in the illocutionary force of the language.Under this hypothesis,this paper uses three methods to improve the illocutionary force of the document:(1)proper use of person deixis;(2)rearranging the order of the contents according to Maslow's Need theory;(3)using case studies to explain main stipulations.The author also applies an empirical research in order to verify this hypothesis.A nonequivalent pretest-post test is designed to check whether the revised version of the document has any effect on the legal cognition of the subjects.To ensure the reliability and validity of the experiment,a large scale of investigation was carried out on chosen candidates before the experiment.And a self-made legal cognition scale was compiled based on the results of the investigation.20 candidates were chosen as the subjects of the experiment,and they were assigned randomly to two groups: the experimental group and the control group.Both groups will be tested after studying the original version of the document.After that the control group will keep studying the original document while the experimental group will change to the revised version of the document.After the learning session,both groups will be tested again to get the results of their legal cognition change.After the comparison of the data from the pretest and posttest of both groups,we find that the legal cognition of the subjects of the experimental group has been improved compared with both that of the control group and their own legal cognition level in pretest.This experiment has proved the truth of the hypothesis that the legal cognition of the migrant workers could be improved by revising the language used in the document.To sum up,this paper proposes a new perspective of improving the legal cognition of the New Generation Migrant Workers,which is through enhancing the illocutionary force of the legal publicity and education language.It also combines psychological method to improve the illocutionary force of the text.In this way the author wants to draw public attention to the language used in the legal education of theNew Generation Migrant Workers and at the same time provides new working method for the legal practitioners.It has great practical meaning to improve the efficiency of the legal publicity and education and to the stability and harmony of the society.