Conditional Markers of Legal Texts: A Comparative Study of Civil Code and Its English Version

Abstract

Conditionals have always been hot topics in linguistics. Biber (1995) analyzes the logical cohesion of 22 Korean registers, Yao (2017) analyzes the differences in the use of 22 conditional markers in Chinese from 8 registers, and they find that legal texts use the least connectives. However, their researches only focus on the comparison of registers from the same language, and do not carry out the comparison of the same register from different languages. From a cross-linguistic perspective, taking Civil Code of the People's Republic of China (‘CC’) and its English version (‘ECC’) as an example, this paper makes study of the conditional markers of legal texts, and finds that: First, the preconditions in CC are always expressed by de constructions, and the Chinese character de is the conditional marker. Second, the postconditions in CC are always expressed by danshu, and the words danshi (but/however) are the conditional markers. Third, the conditions in ECC are expressed by conditional clauses (i.e. initiated by where/if), relative clauses (initiated by who, that, whose, etc.) and other phrases etc., and they function as the conditional markers thereof. Fourth, the provisos in ECC are always introduced by unless, provided that, except, etc., which are the conditional markers thereof. Fifth, as for the use of conditional markers in legislative texts, Chinese is more stylized and rigid compared to those of English, which may have been influenced by the Plain English Movement.