Article published in:
Pragmatics
Vol. 28:4 (2018) ► pp. 463–488

The structural format and rhetorical variation of writing Chinese judicial opinions

A genre analytical approach

| Jinan University
| The Chinese University of Hong Kong
| Shandong Normal University

As Chinese legal system follows a statutory tradition, the writing of Chinese judicial opinions is normally considered as an invariant sequential process of stating the law, presenting the fact, and finally providing the conclusion. The official ideology is further reinforced by the fact that Chinese judges need to follow various authoritative writing guidelines and templates prescribed by the official bodies of legal profession. This paper examines to what extent this ideology is a trustworthy description, and to what extent it is only an imagined myth related to the rhetorical practices of Chinese legal profession. Theoretical constructs employed in the study are genre, text type, and rhetorical modes, and analytical data include exemplar judicial opinions, intertextual legislative documents, and insiders’ accounts. According to the research findings, while the official ideology remains a strong shaping force in the composing of Chinese judicial opinions, Chinese judges do take compelling moves to add dialogic elements to the traditionally monologue-dominated discursive sphere of legal writing.

Keywords: genre analysis, judicial writing, legal ideology, monologue, dialogue
Article outline
  • 1.The unchangeable deductive format of judicial opinions
  • 2.The ideology and reality of judicial opinions
  • 3.A genre analytical approach to judicial opinions
    • 3.1Genre and text type
    • 3.2Data and analysis
  • 4.The rhetorical variations beyond the deductive writing format
    • 4.1Argumentation
    • 4.2Narration
    • 4.3Exposition
    • 4.4Instruction
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Note
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.
Published online: 23 October 2018
https://doi.org/10.1075/prag.17013.ge
References
Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y.
2004 Evidentiality. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Archer, Dawn
2011 “Cross-examining Lawyers, Facework and the Adversarial Courtroom.” Journal of Pragmatics 43 (13): 3216–3230. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Bakhtin, Mikhail
1975/1981 The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Austin: University of Texas Press.Google Scholar
Bhatia, Vijay K.
1993 Aanalysing Genre: Language Use in Professional Settings. London: Longman.Google Scholar
1997 “Genre Analysis Today.” Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire 75 (3): 629–652. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2008 “Creativity and Accessibility in Written Professional Discourse.” World Englishes 27 (3/4): 319–326. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Blitvich, Pilar
2010 “A Genre Approach to the Study of Im-politeness.” International Review of Pragmatics 2 (1): 46–94. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Cheng, Le, King Kui Sin, and Ying-Long Zheng
2008 “Contrastive Analysis of Chinese and American Court Judgments.” Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis across Disciplines 2 (1): 49–58.Google Scholar
Conley, John M., and William M. O’Barr
1990 Rules versus Relationships: The Ethnography of Legal Discourse. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Duke, Nell K., Samantha Caughlan, Mary Juzwik, and Nicole Martin
2012 Reading and Writing Genre with Purpose in K-8 Classrooms. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.Google Scholar
Goffman, Erving
1959 The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Doubleday.Google Scholar
Hafner, Chris A.
2013 “The Discursive Construction of Professional Expertise: Appeals to Authority in Barrister’s Opinions.” English for Specific Purposes 32 (3): 131–143. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Han, Zhengrui
2011 “The Discursive Construction of Civil Judgments in Mainland China.” Discourse & Society 22 (6): 743–765. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2012 Legal Communication of Chinese Judiciary: A Discourse-based View. Bern: Peter Lang. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2016 “The Mediatisation of Chinese Corporate Communication: A Linguistic Approach.” East Asian Pragmatics 1 (1): 127–147. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Han, Zhengrui, and Li Xiaoyu
2011 “Discourse of International Commercial Arbitration: The Case of Mainland China.” Journal of Pragmatics 43 (5): 1380–1391. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Harris, Sandra
1995 “Pragmatics and Power.” Journal of Pragmatics 23 (2): 117–135. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Heffer, Chris
2005 The Language of Jury Trial: A Corpus-Aided Analysis of Legal-Lay Discourse. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Hubbard, Frances K., and Lauren Spencer
2012 Write to Inform. New York: The Rosen Publishing Group, Inc.Google Scholar
Hyland, Ken
2004 Metadiscourse. London: Continuum.Google Scholar
Johnstone, Barbara
2001 “Discourse Analysis and Narrative.” In The Handbook of Discourse Analysis, ed. by D. Schiffrin, D. Tannen, and H. E. Hamilton, 635–649. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Kádár, Daniel
2013 Relational Rituals and Communication: Ritual Interaction in Groups. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Kalscheur, Heidi A.
2012 “About ‘Face’: Using Moral Rights to Increase Copyright Enforcement in China.” Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly 39 (2): 513–538.Google Scholar
Kennedy, George A.
1991 Aristotle, On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Labov, William
2011 “Oral Narratives of Personal Experience.” In Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Language Sciences, ed. by P. C. Hogan, 546–548. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Labov, William, and Joshua Waletzky
1967 “Narrative Analysis.” In Essays on the Verbal and Visual Arts, ed. by J. Helm, 12–44. Seattle: U. of Washington Press. Reprinted in Journal of Narrative and Life History 71: 3–38.Google Scholar
Leflar, Robert A.
1961 “Some Observations Concerning Judicial Opinions.” Columbia Law Review 61(5): 810–820. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Leung, Janny H. C.
2012 “Judicial Discourse in Cantonese Courtrooms in Postcolonial Hong Kong: The Judge as a Godfather, Scholar, Educator and Scolding Parent.” The International Journal of Speech, Language and the Law 19 (2): 239–261. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Liang, Huixing
2011 A General Introduction to Civil Law. Beijing: Law Press.Google Scholar
Maley, Yon
1985 “Judicial Discourse: The Case of Legal Judgment.” In The Cultivated Australian, ed. by J. E. Clark, 159–175. Hamburg: Buske.Google Scholar
Mao, Luming R.
1993 “I Conclude Not: Toward a Pragmatic Account of Metadiscourse.” Rhetoric Review 11 (2): 265–289. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Martin, J. R., and David Rose
2009 Genre Relations: Mapping Cultures. London: Equinox.Google Scholar
Merry, Sally E.
1990 Getting Justice and Getting Even. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Paltridge, Brian
2002 “ Genre, Text type, and the English for Academic Purposes (EAP) Classrooms.” In Genre in the Classroom: Multiple Perspective, ed. by Ann M. Jones, 73–90. Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.Google Scholar
Purcell-Gates, Victoria, Nell K. Duke, and Joseph A. Martineau
2007 “Learning to Read and Write Genre-specific Text: Roles of Authentic Experience and Explicit Teaching.” Reading Research Quarterly 42 (1): 8–45. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Simons, Herbert W., and Jean G. Jones
2011 Persuasion in Society (2nd edition). New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Stevenson, Drury
2003 “To Whom is the Law Addressed.” Yale Law & Policy Review 21 (1): 105–167.Google Scholar
Van Den Hoven, Paul
2011 “The Unchangeable Judicial Formats.” Argumentation 451: 499–511. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Van Leeuwen, Theo J.
2008 Discourse and Practice: New Tools for Critical Discourse Analysis. Oxford: Oxford University Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Vázquez-Orta, Ignacio
2013 “Authoritative Intervention in Legal Discourse: A Genre-based Study of Judgments and Arbitration Awards.” Revista Espanola de Linguistica Aplicada 261: 91–103.Google Scholar
Wells, Michael
1994 “French and American Judicial Opinions.” Yale Journal of International Law 191: 81–133.Google Scholar
Zhang, Liping
2007 “Evaluation in the Language of Law: Appraisal and Its Linguistic Realizations in Chinese Courtroom Discourse (以“评”说“法”: 法庭辩论中的评价资源与实现手段).” Foreign Language Teaching (外语教学) 61: 29–33.Google Scholar

Full-text

The structural format and rhetorical variation of writing Chinese judicial opinions
Cited by

Cited by 1 other publications

Liu, Wenjie, Zhengrui Han, Haiqing Chen & Wei Ren
2021. Discursive practice of Chinese criminal adjudication: A genre perspective. Círculo de Lingüística Aplicada a la Comunicación 86 ► pp. 69 ff. Crossref logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 17 april 2022. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.