中英民事裁决文书元话语的对比研究——佩雷尔曼新修辞学视阈下的分析

A Contrastive Meta-discourse Analysis of British and Chinese Civil Judgments: Perelman’s New Rhetoric Perspective

民事判决文书包含丰富的元话语资源,不仅用表陈述法庭立场,更具有引导与创新功能。本研究摒弃"成品式"研究,倡导对话语"生产性"修辞意图的过程考量。研究采用近几年中英两国民事裁决文书语料,通过自建文书语料库开展定性和定量对比;在佩雷尔曼新修辞学理论下对统计结果做出阐释,揭示出中英法庭方如何组织命题内容、投射自我,及系统化建构各类受众群体。我们认为:英方文书"信服"重于"劝说",而中方"劝说"胜过"信服",与双方的目标受众类型、权力距离、修辞目的等密切关联。

Rich in meta-discourse resources,civil judgments not only state stances and attitudes of the court,but also play a role in guiding and persuading audiences.By rejecting the tradition of merely viewing"discourse as products",the present study emphasizes the author’s rhetoric intentions and persuasion efforts in the"production"of legal discourses.Data include judgments of recent years in UK and China,which were constructed into a small corpus.Both qualitative and quantitative methods were adopted.The framework of Perelman’s New Rhetoric Theory,particularly his"Universal Audience(UA)"and"Particular Audience(PA)"perspectives,were applied to examine how authors of civil judgments organize the propositional content,project themselves,and handle their relations with UA and PA in terms of their target audience groups.It is concluded that the UK civil judgments carry more"conviction"than"persuasion",whereas Chinese civil judgments prefer"persuasion"to"conviction",due to differences in respective target audience types,power relations and rhetoric intentions.