Linguistic Expressions of Conditions of Chinese Legislative Provisions: A Register Grammar Perspective

Abstract

There is difference in the distribution of grammar phenomena in different registers. This paper has carried out a comprehensive study of the linguistic expressions of Conditions in Chinese legislative provisions. In legislative provisions, the Conditions are usually used to indicate the preconditions or circumstances for the legal norm, which are referred to as hypothetical conditions in this paper. In contrast, the clauses introduced by the words dan ‘but’ or danshi ‘but/however’ are called danshus ‘provisos’. Danshus are always positioned after the main clauses, so they are called post-conditions. Legal norms can be categorized into authorization norms, obligatory norms, and compound norms. As special legal norms, danshus can also be categorized into authorization, obligatory and exclusionary danshus respectively. Through a corpus-based analysis of conditions of Chinese legislative provisions, this study has concluded that: i) hypothetical conditions are always expressed by de-constructions; ii) post-conditions are always expressed by danshus, including exclusionary danshus, obligatory danshus and authorization danshus respectively; iii) the use of danshus in Chinese legislative provisions are less than 7% of the total clause numbers; and iv) the co-occurrence of hypothetical conditions and post-conditions are less than 3% of the total clause numbers. Suggestions for future legislation and amendments: First, more danshus should be used; Second, the use of de-constructions should be more standardized; and Third, the co-occurrence of de-constructions and danshus should be increased.