From Genre To Grammar:How Meanings Are Negotiated In Preliminary Assessment Discourse Of Community Correction

China's criminal justice is experiencing a transition from retributive justice to restorative justice and community correction,as a new form of crime punishment towards restorative justice,is being widely practiced in China.Preliminary assessment(or risk assessment)is the base for community correction which can improve the quality and effect of community correction,reduce the recidivism rate,and realize a social and scientific community correction.In Guangzhou,the whole assessment process is based on the Assessment Questionnaire of the Correctees' Needs in Community Correction and proceeds in form of face-to-face interview between the judicial social worker and the correctee.Thanks to the Platform of Community Correction Discourse Research and Language Service co-constructed by Guangdong University of Foreign Studies and the Judicial Bureau of Guangzhou,we have worked as a team to participate in the community correction practice under the guidance of our supervisor.Through this process,we work as the assistant of the judicial social worker and record the assessment process with a recording device upon agreement.We spent almost one year to observe and record 12 preliminary assessments.Through transcribing the recordings into written materials,we altogether got the data including about 45,000 Chinese characters for our research.This thesis applies Martin's appliable linguistics theory to the analysis of preliminary assessment discourse in community correction and describes the data collected from observation,recording and transcription of more than 10 assessments.According to Martin's genre theory,the preliminary assessment discourse can be seen as a macro-genre with an overall goal and specific goals of each stages to be realized as the interview unfolds.By means of interpreting the discourse from generic structure and exchange structure,it is aimed to illustrate how the goals are realized through the discourse semantic system of NEGOTIATION.In addition to generic goals and their grammatical realization,this thesis also takes the tenor variation in register into consideration,exploring how it influences the realization process.Based on analysis,an idealized model of exchange structure is designed in the hope of providing the judicial social worker with more effective linguistic choices and thus promoting the accuracy and effectiveness of preliminary assessment.