A Corpus-based Contrastive Analysis Of The Hedges In Chinese And American Contract Laws

As an inherent attribute of natural language,hedging of language,due to the use of hedges,has aroused increasing attention of many scholars from China and abroad.Although the legal language is known for its rigorousness,hedging is still inevitable,even in the Contract Law which claims to protect the civil rights and obligations between the equal parties.As people are faced with more and more disputes in international economic activities,it is especially important to study the hedges of the English version of the Contract Law.The Contract Law of the People's Republic of China,as a basic law of maintaining the order of the socialist market economy,plays an important role in safeguarding the order of market transactions,promoting the development of social economy,protecting the lawful rights and interests of the contracting parties and ensuring the security of the transaction as well.With more and more economic exchanges between China and the United States,joint ventures between the countries are so drastically increasing that the past decades saw the increase of the trade disputes caused by the use of hedges in the Contract Law,which requires us to analyze and study the relevant contents of the Contract Laws of the two countries.In this thesis two small self-built corpora are constructed based on the English translation of the Contract Law of the People's Republic of China(1999)and the English version of the American Contract Law(1981)to study the use of hedges in the two corpora.Based on the definition and classification of Hyland(1998),the author chooses the English translation of the Contract Law of the People's Republic of China and the English version of the American Contract Law as the research objects.In the thesis,the softwares CLAWS7,AntConc and SPSS are respectively used to tag the part of speech,extract the hedges and analyze whether there is any significance in the difference.The method of combining quantitative and qualitative analysis is also adopted to conduct a contrastive analysis of the use of hedges in the two corpora,which aims to explore the overall quantities,frequency and distribution of hedges and further studies the similarities and differences in the use of hedges in the two corpora for the investigation of the underlying reasons.The results indicate that the occurrence of hedges in American Contract Law is more frequent than that in the Contract Law of the People's Republic of China.Meanwhile,there are some differences in the use of hedges between the two corpora,in which the distribution of each type is similar,but the frequency of epistemic modal verbs and non-lexical hedges is higher in the Contract Law of the People's Republic of China than that of American Contract Law.Furthermore,in the two corpora,epistemic adjectives occur most frequently,but the frequency of epistemic verbs,adverbs and nouns is relatively low.At the same time,the thesis discusses the differences in the use of hedges in the two corpora from the perspective of different legal systems,language factors and social-cultures.