Author(s)

Zhenjuan Li ¹, Zhenhua Zhao ², Yuhua Li ³

Affiliation(s)

¹ College of Liberal Arts and Communication, De La Salle University - Dasmariñas, DBB-B City of Dasmariñas, Cavite, Philippines
² College of Education, De La Salle University - Dasmariñas, DBB-B City of Dasmariñas, Cavite, Philippines
³ College of Life Sciences, Zhengzhou Normal University, Yingcai Street, Zhengzhou, P. R. China

Corresponding Author

Yuhua Li

ABSTRACT

Legal texts are linguistically professional texts, which function for specific communication purposes in society. To get a clear understanding of how legal texts realize the relative pragmatic functions, this study tries to investigate the modification and cohesive devices in legal texts from the lexical and syntactical levels, and also to explore how they differ from those devices in general texts. Based upon an English court verdict text, this study explored the modification patterns under Brinton's classification of linguistic modification and the cohesive devices based on Halliday's cohesive device model. This study found that legal texts mostly feature syntactic embeddedness, especially with several modificational insertions in long sentences, and logical and continuous argument with various cohesive devices, together to realize linguistic precision and avoidance of ambiguity.

KEYWORDS

Legal discourse, modification devices, cohesive devices, register

CITE THIS PAPER

Zhenjuan Li, Zhenhua Zhao, Yuhua Li, Modification and Cohesive Devices in Legal Discourse. Lecture Notes on Language and Literature (2022) Vol. 5: 49-62. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.23977/langl.2022.050508.

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