A Comparative Study Of Attitudinal Resources In Chinese And American Second Instance Judgments Of Criminal Cases

Forensic linguistics is a cross-disciplinary branch of linguistics; it is the systemic and scientific study of the language of law. The past decades have witnessed a rapid development of this discipline both at home and abroad; it has become one of the hot topics of linguistic study. Due to the central status of language in legal enterprise, forensic linguistics has naturally attracted considerable attention and interest from a wide range of areas; the study in forensic linguistics has broaden the application fields of linguistic theories and provided many insightful implications for the legal profession.The present study is based on the ATTITUDE system of the Appraisal Theory. By means of qualitative and quantitative analysis, the present study conducts a comparative study of the attitudinal resources in American and Chinese second instance judgments of criminal cases. ATTITUDE is one of the three systems of Appraisal Theory, and it is an indispensable part of the interpersonal metafunction of language. Ever since its coming into being, this theory has been widely used for discourse analysis, such as the analysis of news texts and historical texts. However, the attitudinal resources in judgments seem to be underexplored. The data of the present study consists of 16 American and Chinese second instance judgments of criminal cases, 8 for each kind; they are of legal and authentic source.The total number of words amounts to more than 92, 000.The study gives a comprehensive description of the attitudinal resources in American and Chinese second judgments of criminal cases; based on that, a comparison is conducted.According to the comparison, the similarities are: (1) The vast majority of the attitudinal resources are judgment and appreciation; the affect resources play only a marginal role;among the subcategories of affect, desire is dominating, with the other subcategories being rarely employed. (2) Most of the attitudinal resources in American and Chinese judgments are negative. (3) In both kinds of judgments, appellate court and the appellant are the major sources of attitudes. More than half of the attitudes from the appellate court are positive,while the major part of the appellant's attitudes is negative.The differences include: (1) In American judgments, the appellant makes use of negative judgment resources to assign errors to the trial court and its judge's behavior;while in Chinese judgments, the appellant does not directly evaluate the behavior of the trial court or its judge, rather, s/he employs negative appreciation resources to evaluate the value of the original judgment. (2) In American judgments, no positive judgment is made with regard to the appellant's behavior; while in Chinese judgments, various parties,including the appellant, appellate court, and the trial court, make positive judgment concerning the appellant's corporative behavior in the investigation. (3) It is also found that in Chinese judgments the value of "facts of the case" is frequently evaluated. While in American judgments no attitudinal resources of any kind are concerned with the fact of the case.As for the reasons that give rise to these similarities and differences, we hold that the similarities result from the fact that both kinds of judgments belong to the same register and have the same or similar set of register variables. And the differences are consequences of the differences of the legal system and culture of the two countries. The present study proves that Appraisal Theory is a useful tool for the analysis of attitudinal resources in judgments, meanwhile, it makes contribution to the description of the attitudinal resources in judgments.