A Pragmatic Contrastive Study Of The Foreign Trade Law Of The People's Republic Of China And United Nations Convention On Contracts For The International Sale Of Goods Based On The Adaptation Theory

As the basic strings for the foreign trade dealers,the Foreign Trade Law of the People's Republic of China and United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods should be obeyed by all the members who are involved in multinational business activities.These two legal texts are entitled to the great influence on foreign trade activities.Thus,there are so many researchers have done studies on them.However,these studies mainly focused on the laws themselves and their significance of practice.The researches on legal texts from the perspective of linguistics are not common.On the other hand,the Adaptation Theory was usually applied to translation field.Therefore,this paper will analyze pragmatic features of the Foreign Trade Law of PRC and CISG from the perspective of Adaptation Theory.This paper will apply the contrastive and descriptive methods to analyze and explicate the pragmatic features of the language used in The Foreign Trade Law of the People's Republic of China and United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods from the contextual and structural adaptation based on the Adaptation Theory.With respect to contextual adaptation,this thesis will analyze the adaptation of mental world,social world and physical world;with respect to structural adaptation,the author focuses on the lexical and syntactical level and concludes the similarities and differences between the language choices of research data.The findings can be concluded as below: first,the language of these two legal texts cater people's mental world,which is the pursuit of and desire for justice and fairness,and some vague expressions leave the discretion power for the judicial officers to make the judgments fair and impartial;second,different pragmatic language choices have been made by different social settings and cultural background;third,the medium and low value modal verbs are used frequently in both of the two legal texts,which can decrease the impression of strictness and rigid features of the legal texts;fourth,the active voice is used more frequently in The Foreign Trade Law of the People's Republic of China,while there are more passive voicesentences in United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods;finally,there are more simple sentences in Foreign Trade Law of the People's Republic of China,and the complex sentences are more frequently used in United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods.