NEWS & EVENTS


 

Appliable Linguistics Seminar 10
(Seminar on Language Science and System Science 76

April 25, 2015

Time: 16:00, 29 April 2015

Venue: #313, School of Foreign Languages

Speaker: Tian Huajing

Title: Exploring Defense Lawyer's Attitudes in View of Linguistic Indeterminacy – From the Sociosemiotic Perspective

Abstract: With the western philosophical evolutions from reason to rationality then to reasonableness, the modern democracy requires public reasoning instead of power domination and language violence in every aspect of life, among which the reasoning in judicial documents is of great significance for the construction of modern democracy and rule of law. Nonetheless, the insufficiency in reasoning of judicial documents in China has become the consensus, thus improving the reasoning has become the top priority in Chinese judicial reform. The studies on the reasoning of the judicial documents from the legal field have paid great attention to the reason exploration and countermeasure proposition from the macro-level. While reasoning is realized through language, it is quite necessary and beneficial to construct the operative framework to improve the reasoning from the micro level of language. This study attempts to examine the context of meaning genesis of the judicial documents from the perspectives of genre and register, and then analyze the discourse semantic features in the fact construction, interpersonal negotiation and logical presentation from the three metafunctions of Systemic Functional Linguistics. Through the analysis, it aims to offer some guidance for drafting the reasonable judicial documents and contribute to the judicial justice and social equality as well as the construction of the socialist country under the rule of law.

Key Words: judicial documents, reasoning, fact construction, interpersonal negotiation, logical presentation