A Study of Cohesion in the Chinese Legal Text: Based on Criminal Procedure Law of the People’s Republic of China
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17507/tpls.1112.25Keywords:
Cohesion Theory, Chinese legal text, textual features, quantitative analysisAbstract
This study analyzes the textual cohesion of Criminal Procedure Law of the People’s Republic of China from the perspective view of Cohesion Theory. According to the data analysis, the study indicates that, in this legal text, the means of cohesion occurs totally 792 times, among which grammatical cohesion takes a large proportion, that is, 83.9%, while lexical cohesion takes the ration of 16.1%. In the lexical cohesion, the repetition is used much more frequently, followed by the means of hyponymy/meronymy, synonymy/antonymy and collocation, taking the ratio of 0.8%, 0.5% and 0.4% respectively. Thus, we can know from the statistics that cohesion is an important feature of the Chinese legal text. It connects the syntactic grammar and the lexicons into together closely in the Chinese legal Articles. Therefore, the paper points out that a proper understanding of the cohesive devices in the Chinese legal text is significant to legal draftsmen and social scientists in the field of language and the law, for they might improve the text quality of their work with it.
References
Criminal Procedure Law of the People’s Republic of China (the Chinese version and the English version). (2018). Available at: https://www.lawinfochina.com/display.aspx?id=29202&lib=law
Fakuade, G.& Vargs, J. L. (1992). Cohesion and text creation. Language Learning Journal, 5(1), 88-89
Georgakopoulou, A and Dionysis. (1997). Discourse Analysis. Bodmin; Cornwell: Edinburgh University Press.
Halliday, M.A.K. (1994). Introduction to Functional Grammar (2nd edn). London: Edward Arnold.
Halliday, M.A.K. and Hansan, R. (1976). Cohesion in English. London: Longman Group Limited. 2, 284.
Halliday, M.A.K. & C.M.E.M. Matthiessen. (2004). Introduction to Functional Grammar (3rd edn). London: Edward Arnold.
Hasan, R. (1984). Coherence and Cohesive Harmony . International Reading Association.
Maley, Y. (1994). The language of the law. In Gibbons, John. (Ed.), Language and the law. London: Longman. 3-50.
Shifang Li & Yifan Wang. (2020). Systemic Functional Analysis of Thematic Structure in Legislative Discourse—Based on Criminal Procedure Law of the People’s Republic of China. Proceedings of the 2020 International Conference on Language, Communication and Culture Studies (ICLCCS 2020). Atlantis Press.
Shifang Li & Yifan Wang. (2021). An Analysis of the Textual Features of Legal Discourse from the Perspective of Thematic Progression: Based on Criminal Procedure Law of the People’s Republic of China, Theory and Practice in Language Studies. (11)7, 829-835.
Thompson, Geoffrey. (2004). Introducing Functional Grammar (2nd edn). London: Edward Arnold. 179,180.
Zhu yongsheng. (2001). The contribution of functional linguistics to stylistic analysis. Foreign languages and foreign language teaching. (5), 1-4.