A Study of the Thematic Progression in Legal English Discourse

Meng MIAO

Abstract


Being a special kind of language application, legal English enjoys its unique stylistic features, which are concise, logic, coherent and rigorous. It is quite meaningful and fruitful to study these features in discourse, which is the study of discourse analysis. System-functional linguistics provides distinguished perspective for discourse analysis, and once Halliday, the founder of System-functional linguistics, pointed out the system-functional grammar and its theories can be applied to legal English studies. This essay mainly discusses, analyzes and focuses on the discourse analysis of legal English and takes The Constitution of the United States of America as corpora to study from the perspective of Thematic Progression. It tries to explain how the Thematic Progression worked in developing the legal English discourse and how it helped legal English discourse to reach its features. Meanwhile it also hoped to inspire the application of linguistic theory into legal English studies.


Keywords


Thematic progression; Legal English discourse; System-functional linguistics; The Constitution of the United States of America

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References


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DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3968/9946

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