A Critical Discourse Analysis of the Civil Judgment of “The Besieged City” Copyright Infringement Case

Abstract

Based on Fairclough’s three-dimensional model, this paper sets out to give a critical discourse analysis of the civil Chinese judgment of“The Besieged City”Copyright Infringement Case by adopting a descriptive and explanatory approach. This study analyzes the main linguistic manifestations of power asymmetries in the language of a civil judgment and investigates how the power relations among different participants are shown in the social court context. It is found that address forms, formal words, nominalization, modality, imperatives and ellipsis are the main linguistic manifestations of power asymmetries among court participants. The interpretation and explanation of the situational court context manifests to a certain extent the encoding power relations, and such social structure of power relations help shape the discourse of judgment, and the discourse itself reinforces the enactment of the power relations. It is hoped that the findings of the present research may provide legal professions with new insights into drafting and reading judgments and provide reference for legal laypersons to have a critical understanding of civil judgments whenever they become a reader of this kind of judicial genre.