A Study On The Interrelationship Between The Three Planes In The General Civil Law Of People's Republic Of China

The General Civil Law of People's Republic of China(or the GCL for short)is a basic civil law.It adjusts the property relationship and personal relationship between civil subjects,and is closely related to our daily life.With the development of Forensic Linguistics,more and more studies use linguistic theories to analyze legislative texts,but formal linguistic analyses are rather few.Existing formal researches are conducted from either the syntactic or the pragmatic perspective.Based on the Three Plane Theory,this study regards sentences as combinations of the syntactic,the semantic and the pragmatic structures.Agreeing with the idea that the syntactic,the semantic and the pragmatic planes influence each other,it tries to describe the relationship and interaction between the three planes in the GCL.This study is a qualitative research supplemented by quantitative methods.The data was analyzed,collected and calculated manually.First,the research material was divided into small units which have only one core-verb.Then,component analysis was done on these units,and their corresponding information was recorded in EXCEL.Finally,with the help of the filter in the EXCEL,data in each column was analyzed independently as well as compared with each other.This study focuses on the following three research questions:(1)What syntactic features and semantic features does the GCL have?(2)What is the relationship(or projection principle)between the syntactic and the semantic structures in the GCL?(3)How do pragmatic factors influence the syntactic and the semantic structures in the GCL ?After the analysis,it found out that:(1)Sentence types in the GCL are limited,and there are a large number of marked sentences.Moreover,objects,goals and optional arguments of condition in the GCL have complicated internal structures,and the agents are omitted frequently.(2)The semantic structure and the syntactic structure are in one to many and many to one relationship.One semantic structure can transform into different kinds of syntactic structure on the surface.On the other hand,different deep semantic structures can derive the same syntactic structure.(3)Pragmatic needs of the GCL result in frequent agent omission and plenty ofmarked sentences.This study is a formal linguistic analysis which describes the relationship and interaction between the three planes in a specific legislative text.It provides a basis for further analysis of legislative texts' linguistic features,and offers some reference to contrastive analysis between the GCL and texts in other genres.