| As a carrier of spreading the trial process and judgment of cases,legal news reports play a vital role in shaping the public knowledge of the cases.At present,most scholars have studied the legal news from the perspective of law and journalism,which disclosed such problems as moral anomie,the complex relationship between the media and the judiciary.Little attention is devoted to researches on whether the news writer’s personal prejudices are embedded in news contents.This thesis endeavors to analyze,from the perspective of social cognition,two kinds of prejudiced discourses in Peng Yu case-related cases respectively,namely the moral prejudice against the elderly and judicial cognitive prejudice against the legal logic.In Peng Yu case which happened in 2006,the old lady Xu Shoulan was knocked down into a fracture in a bus station in Nanjing,and Peng Yu was identified as the person who should be responsible for the accident.Peng Yu was sentenced to compensate Mrs.Xu more than 40000 yuan in the first instance judgment.However,Peng Yu expressed his dissatisfaction with the decision because of some mistakes in it.Then he took judicial proceedings against the judgment and resorted to the media with the reason that "people who helped others were wrongly treated" and thus gained the wide attention from the media on the case.The fact that the reconciliation between two parties was made in the second instance judgment in 2008 intensified the force of media.Finally,relevant departments released the truth of the case in 2012 where Peng Yu admitted his collision with the old lady.Under the framework of Van Dijk’s socio-cognitive approach and Halliday’s systemic-functional grammar,this thesis is devoted to studying the prejudiced discourses in legal news reports through the analysis on 120 sample news reports dated from 2007 to 2016 concerning Peng Yu Case in Nanjing,which are extracted randomly from several metropolis newspapers under the category of newspaper in MIIT’s knowledge sharing platform.In view of the twists and turns of Peng Yu case,this thesis is divided into three periods,namely 2007-2011,2012 and 2012-2016,based on the public’s attitudes towards the case.75 pieces of news are collected from 2007 to 2011,15 in 2012 and 30 from 2013 to 2016.First and foremost,by making analysis of the key evaluative verbs and their objects adjacent to "Peng Yu case" in the data set,it can be found that verbs such as"misunderstand" and "exaggerate" were applied to clarify media’s misunderstanding of the case in 2012,while negative verbs such as "affect","harm","fetter","follow the tracks of an overthrown chariot",)etc.were adopted by news writers to criticize the adverse social impact of the case on morality and judiciary in other periods.Secondly,participants in the case and the relevant processes in reports were analyzed in terms of the transitivity system.Conclusions can be made that news writers’ moral prejudices against the elderly,"viciousness" and "avarice",were represented in news reports in periods except 2012.In addition,by analyzing how the news writers reported the legal logic in the first-instance judgment,it can be found that except the objective statements made by several news writers in 2012,most of the news writers’words reflected their judicial prejudices against the legal logic.The present study is significant in that news reports are not only accounts of the legal cases,but also reflections of the news writers’ understanding of the case.Therefore,they play an important role in affecting the public’s understanding of the cases to some extent.Second,by analyzing some language techniques used in legal news reports,readers can have a correct understanding of reports. |
