Contrastive Analysis of Chinese and American Court Judgments
Cheng Le, City University of Hong Kong
Sin Kui King, City University of Hong Kong
Zheng Ying-Long, Zhejiang Gongshang University
Abstract
Whether
in legal practice or jurisprudence, court judgments or case briefs are one of
the most important legal genres for the legal profession. The paper aims to
examine contrastively the linguistic characteristics, moves and rhetoric of Chinese
and American court judgments, with the aim of specifying the rhetorical
preferences that are characteristic of ‘standard' judgments. Legal cultures are
employed to account for the generic and rhetorical differences. This study also
has an underlying pedagogical motivation in that the results would be of great
value and interest to the Chinese students of Language for Legal Purposes (LLP)
and the lawyers practicing foreign legal affairs.
Download
Download full text of the article as PDF
(We recommend the free FoxIt PDF Viewer or Adobe Acrobat Reader 8 for better PDF experience.)
References
Bhatia, V.K. (1997). Applied genre analysis and ESP. In
T. Miller (ed.), Functional Approaches to
Written Text: Classroom Applications. English Language Programs: United
States Information Agency.
Connor, U. (1996). Contrastive
Rhetoric: Cross-cultural Aspects of Second-language Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Firth, J.R. (1957). Thesis in Linguistics. London: Oxford University
Press.
Glendon, Mary A., Michael W. Gordon, Paolo G.
Carozza (2003). Comparative legal
traditions (2nd ed). Peking: Law Press.
Halliday, M.A.K. (1985). An Introduction to Functional Grammar. London: Edward Arnold.
Maley, Y. (1985). Judicial
Discourse: The Case of the Legal Judgment. Festschrift in honour of Arthur
Delbridge. Beitrage zur Phonetic und Linguistik
Myers, G. (1992). Speech acts and scientific facts. Journal of Pragmatics 17.
