法律语言的语言特征及其翻译原则（外文翻译资料）.docxVIP

Statutes and contracts: An analysis of legal speech acts in the English language of the law The Aarhus School of Business, Department of English, Fuglesangs All?4，DK-8210 Aarhus V, Denmark Abstract This paper is concerned with the language used in legal speech acts in legislative texts and contracts in the field of English Contract Law. The central objects of study are regulative functions with a particular view to establishing realization patterns of the rhetorical functions of directive and commissive acts. The findings show that the language of the law characteris-tically selects patterns of regulatives distinct from, for example, the patterns typically selected in everyday conversational English. The characteristics of the language of the law can be interpreted within the adherence to legal institutions, as well as in terms of the face redress required by the socio-pragmatic situation. L Background The field of legal language within the written medium is unique with regard to distinctive lexical features, such as technical terms, archaic expressions, etc., and it is renowned for its syntactic complexity, which has given rise to a number of studies of these aspects (see, e.g. Danet, 1985: 278-287). However, with the exception of a few studies (e.g. Kurzon, 1986; Werther and Helmersen, 1989), little attention has been given to pragmatics and politeness in written legal discourse. In the field of pragmatics (including work on politeness phenomena), research has been concerned primarily with oral discourse, often based on non-sequential hypo-thetical data, and very few studies are concerned with pragmatics and politeness in written discourse (see, e.g. Myers, 1989; Pilegaard, 1990). This paper presents a pragmatic study of a highly specialized discourse, viz. the language of authentic legislative texts and contracts, which are analyzed for socio-pragmatic occurrence and pragmalinguistic realization of regulative acts. Politeness is discussed within a consideration