法律语言的语法隐喻——以美国宪法为研究案例

随着20世纪80年代以来语法隐喻的飞速发展，法律语言中的语法隐喻引起了语言学家们的重视。法律语言作为特定的专业语言，法律语言在句法结构方面有着正式的语法形式规则，这反映了法律语言中有着大量语法隐喻的应用。
    美国宪法作为世界上第一部成文宪法，它不仅仅是美国法律的基石，更是在法律语篇中占有重要的地位。在很大程度上，对于美国宪法文本中语法隐喻应用的研究能够反映法律语言中的语法隐喻应用。
本文以韩礼德的语法隐喻理论为基础，以美国宪法为研究对象，探究语法隐喻在法律文本中的应用。本文对语法隐喻在美国宪法中的出现频率进行了定量研究，在此基础上对语法隐喻在美国宪法中的作用进行了定性研究。本文研究的一个重要方面是语法隐喻在美国宪法中的应用更多的是通过名词化体现。语法隐喻能增强法律语篇的词汇密度，使文章简洁，保持客观性和准确性，同时，通过语法隐喻将复杂信息从抽象转换为具体，使读者更好地掌握立法者的意图。本文研究成果不仅是对韩礼德的语法隐喻理论的补充，而且还能帮助人们正确阅读法律文本，引导人们进一步理解法律语篇的内容，更好的去遵守法律法规。
 
   关键词：法律语篇；语法隐喻；美国宪法
 THE GRAMMATICAL METAPHOR IN LEGAL LANGUAGE : A CASE STUDY OF THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES

ABSTRACT

    With the rapid development of study on grammatical metaphor since 1980s, grammatical metaphor in legal language has naturally attracted the attention to linguists. As language of specific and professional use, legal language has formal rules of grammar and in terms of syntactic structure, reflecting a lot of applications of grammatical metaphor.
    As the first written constitution on the earth, the United States Constitution is not only the cornerstone of American law, but also occupies an important position in the legal discourse. To a great extent, the study of grammatical metaphor in the text of the American Constitution well demonstrate the application of grammatical metaphor in legal language.
    Based on Halliday's grammatical metaphor theory, taking the U.S. Constitution as the object of study, this thesis explores the application of grammatical metaphor in legal discourse. This thesis carries out quantitative study to analyze frequency of occurrence of grammatical metaphor in the U.S. Constitution, based on which qualitative study of the collected data is done to the function of grammatical metaphor in the U.S. Constitution. One important aspect has been addressed in this thesis is that grammatical metaphor is always applied in the U.S. Constitution by means of nominalization. Grammatical metaphor increases lexical density of legal discourse which makes the text concise in order to maintain objectivity and accuracy of legal discourse, meanwhile, it also transfer complex information from abstract to concrete which let readers better understand what are legislators’ purposes. The findings of this paper not only make an exploration towards Halliday's theory of grammatical metaphor, but also an effective tool suggesting people to read the legal discourse in a right way, guiding people to further understand the whole context of legal discourse, better obeying laws and regulations.
 
    Key Words: legal discourse, grammatical metaphor, The U.S. Constitution

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