A Study Of Engagement System In Criminal Judgments

The Supreme People's Court has repeatedly issued documents for speeding up the reform of judgments,which focuses on strengthening the analysis and attestation of disputed evidence in the cross-examination and enhancing the reasoning of judgments.Therefore,the study of the language of judgments has drawn much attention.Criminal judgments are legal documents dealing with related criminal cases,thus they are harshly worded,which are different from other legal documents such as civil judgments.The current linguistic studies on Chinese criminal judgments mainly involve translation,interpersonal function,and structural and linguistic features,and few studies are devoted to the engagement resources in Chinese criminal judgments.Taking the engagement system in Appraisal Theory as the theoretical basis,this thesis constructs the analytical framework for the engagement system in Chinese criminal judgments based on their language features,to explore the following questions: 1.What are the frequencies of engagement resources in Chinese criminal judgments? 2.How are engagement resources distributed in different parts of Chinese criminal judgments? 3.What are the interpersonal functions of engagement resources in Chinese criminal judgments?The corpus of this thesis is selected from China Judgments Online hosted by the Supreme People's Court.We randomly selected 100 criminal judgments issued by the Supreme People's Court and courts of different provinces,municipalities and autonomous regions and built a corpus of about 230,000 characters.We adopted both quantitative and qualitative methods in this study.Quantitative analysis is realized by manual annotation to find out the frequencies and distributions of the engagement resources in criminal judgments.Qualitative method is used to further explore the realizations of the engagement system in Chinese criminal judgments and their interpersonal functions.The research finds out that: 1.In Chinese criminal judgments,the engagement resources within contract outweigh the ones within expand,which makes up 63.57% and36.43% respectively of the overall engagement resources.Within the next layer,disclaim is the most frequently adopted engagement strategy,accounting for 43.05% of the overall engagement resources,followed by proclaim(20.52%),entertain(18.73%),and attribute(17.70%).As to the individual categories within the engagement system,deny takes the largest proportion,accounting for 39.62% of all the engagement resources.Besides,entertain(18.73%),acknowledge(14.58%),pronounce(7.75%)and endorse(7.21%)are the other four kinds of engagement resources favored by judges when writing criminal judgments.On the contrary,counter(3.43%),endorse + pronounce(3.22%),concede(2.34%),endorse + acknowledge(2.13%),and distance(0.99%)are the less favorable engagement resources used by judges.2.The dialogic space is different in each part of judgments as they adopt different engagement strategies.The dialogic space in the first three parts is narrowed down,and nearly closed up in the result part,and then turned to open up in the ending of criminal judgments.3.The use of engagement strategies such as deny,pronounce,endorse + pronounce,endorse,and distance indicate that criminal judgments are just,authoritative,persuasive and compulsory.Judgements also respect parties' litigation rights by acknowledging their arguments and submissions.Meanwhile,by adopting counter,concede and entertain,judgments try to make themselves more acceptable.This study probes into the engagement resources in Chinese criminal judgments,which expands the application scope of the engagement system,and provides readers with a new perspective to understand Chinese criminal judgments.