A Study Of Speech Acts In Chinese Legislative Texts Based On Force Dynamics

Speech act theory is one of the most important theories in pragmatics.A number of researches have been made to investigate illocutionary acts.However,only intentions of the addresser are studied in previous studies.How such intentions affect the addressee's mental activities and whether he chooses to perform the action or not have seldom been discussed in detail.In short,there are few studies on revealing the process of “saying is a part of performing”.In order to explain “saying is a part of performing”,based on the data from Parallel Corpus of China's Law Documents(PCCLD),this paper makes an analysis of force dynamic patterns of three legal speech acts including permission,ordering and prohibition according to Talmy's force dynamic theory.The research findings are summarized as follows: First of all,it is the coercive power of Law that guarantees the implementation of legal speech acts,which aims to regulate and stipulate legal subject's acts.Such power provides legal speech acts with strong illocutionary force.Secondly,illocutionary force plays different roles in legal speech acts.In permission type,the main function of illocutionary force is to make sure that legal subjects are able to enjoy its rights and prevent such activities from others' damage.While in ordering and prohibition types,the main functions of illocutionary force is to urge legal subjects to carry out its obligations.Thirdly,this paper finds that the interactions in psychological and social domains influence each other and decide the result of interactions.Finally,two functions of illocutionary force are also discussed in this paper: one is to guarantee the expression of legislative intent(illocutionary act)and the other is to enforce the implementation of law(perlocutionary act).In sum,on the one hand,this paper makes an analysis of the mechanism behind “saying is a part of performing” in a systematic way;on the other hand,it is a bold attempt to discuss legal speech acts from the perspective of cognition and opens up a way for further researches in this field.