A Study of Cohesion in the Chinese Legal Text: Based on Criminal Procedure Law of the People’s Republic of China

Abstract

This study analyzes the textual cohesion of Criminal Procedure Law of the People’s Republic of China from the perspective view of Cohesion Theory. According to the data analysis, the study indicates that, in this legal text, the means of cohesion occurs totally 792 times, among which grammatical cohesion takes a large proportion, that is, 83.9%, while lexical cohesion takes the ration of 16.1%. In the lexical cohesion, the repetition is used much more frequently, followed by the means of hyponymy/meronymy, synonymy/antonymy and collocation, taking the ratio of 0.8%, 0.5% and 0.4% respectively. Thus, we can know from the statistics that cohesion is an important feature of the Chinese legal text. It connects the syntactic grammar and the lexicons into together closely in the Chinese legal Articles. Therefore, the paper points out that a proper understanding of the cohesive devices in the Chinese legal text is significant to legal draftsmen and social scientists in the field of language and the law, for they might improve the text quality of their work with it.