Exploring Implicit Meta-Discourse in Legal Discourse: An Analysis of the Chinese and American Constitutions

Abstract

Research in meta-discourse, particularly explicit meta-discourse or meta-discourse markers has contributed much knowledge on the discourse features of specialised genres. However, there are very few studies on implicit meta-discourse. The current study explores implicit meta-discourse in legal discourse by comparing the implicit interpersonal meta-discourse in the Constitution of the People's Republic of China with the Constitution of the United States. The focus of the study is the use of implicit meta-discourse, particularly the grammatical meta-discourse in the legal discourse of two different languages and cultural groups. The findings demonstrate that there are similarities and differences in the use of implicit meta-discourse in the two constitutions. Within the context of language discourse, the findings of the current study suggest that legal discourse is distinctive in the use of implicit interpersonal meta-discourse, particularly in the way writers intrude into the discourse implicitly by certain key grammatical forms of meta-discourse. Despite the objectivity and rigour of legal discourse, the current study found that there is some level of subjectivity in such discourse, evident from the use of implicit meta-discourse.Keywords: implicit meta-discourse; meta-discourse markers; legal discourse; interpersonal metadiscourse Meta-discourse refers to the means by which writers organise a text, express their attitude, and establish a relationship with readers. It is an important means of conveying the information, building writer-reader interactions and facilitating understanding. Since its introduction by the structural linguist Zelig Harris (1959), there has been an increasing body of research in meta-discourse (e.g., Crismore, 1983;Vande Kopple, 1985;Beauvais, 1989;Ädel, 2006;Hyland, 2008;Kawase, 2015;Zhang, 2016;Jiang & Hyland, 2016) which has contributed new knowledge and understanding regarding its use and function in discourse.To date, studies on meta-discourse have focused largely on meta-discourse markers, which are also known as explicit meta-discourse. They are essentially explicit textual markers and have been analysed from different perspectives. Hopper (1981) used the term "meta-talk" to refer to explicit forms of meta-discourse and defined meta-discourse as explicit verbal properties of another message. The classifications of this type of explicit meta-discourse include metalinguistic referent (e.g., discourse deixis: there, here; demonstrative pronouns: this, that, etc.), metalinguistic operators (e.g., right, wrong, true, false, for example, etc.) and metalinguistic verbs (e.g., illocutionary acts of speech or verbs of saying: assert, say, tell, etc.). Beauvais' (1989) examination of meta-discourse based on speech act theory suggests that metadiscourse is the element in a sentence that conveys illocutionary contents in either fully or partially explicit form. In the sentence "I believe that education is necessary" for instance, the metadiscourse marker is "I believe that." It is an ...

Comparing Engagement Markers in Economics Research Articles and Opinion Pieces: A Corpus-based Study

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