Department of English, Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, University of Macau
Vol.3 No.1 (Serial No.3) 2009
121-130
2009-10-01
The present study is a contrastive study of inter-sentence conjunctions in Chinese/English legal parallel texts. Conjunction is one of the five cohesive devices put forward by Halliday and Hasan (1976). Many scholars have applied their model of cohesion to the study of English and Chinese languages. As for the use of conjunction in Chinese and English, most scholars believe that there are more cases of conjunction in the English legal texts than in the Chinese ones because it is generally considered that Chinese is predominantly paratactic and English mainly hypotactic. Besides, up to now little detailed contrastive study has been done on conjunctions in Chinese/English non-literary texts. Legal language is a specialized language whose distinctive feature is the pursuit of precision. As a result of the importance attached to the letter of law and the pursuit of precision in legal texts, most studies on legal language are devoted to the characteristic features of legal language at the word and sentence level, to the exclusion of textual and pragmatic considerations. The present study will mainly look at the features of legal texts from the perspective of conjunction at the textual level and find out whether Chinese uses fewer cases of conjunction than English in legal texts. The Chinese and English legal parallel texts about arbitration rules will be used for this contrastive analysis. It is hoped that the findings of this research will test the explanatory force of hypotaxis and parataxis in the use of conjunction in legal texts and give a clearer picture of conjunction at the textual level in Chinese and English legal parallel texts, and therefore reconstruct the discourse on the Chinese language.
conjunction, Chinese and English, legal parallel texts, hypotaxis; parataxis
doi:10.26478/ja2009.3.3.6
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