Evidentiality of court judgments in the People’s Republic of China: A semiotic perspective

Abstract

Human cognition affects the result of symbolic activity. Evidentiality is a linguistic concept which encodes the source of information and expresses the attitude and confidence of speaker. This paper collects 31 judgments from the Supreme People’s Court (SPC) and local people’s courts in the People’s Republic of China (P.R.C) as the research corpus, and analyzes the evidentiality in four aspects: information source, lingual form, evidential function and speaker’s attitude of the information. It is found in this study that: 1) The information sources are divided into four types as cultural belief, sensory experience, verbal rumor and inferential hypothesis; 2) Lingual form consists of three categories: vocabulary, phrase and compound sentence; 3) Evidentiality in court judgments performs four functions: support with citation, induction with description, paraphrase with less responsibility and summarization with reasoning; 4) The reliability of evidentiality presents a two-tier structure based on different information sources. From the perspective of Peirce’s semiotics, the paper analyzes the judicial practice of court judgments with actual data and proposes some suggestions.

A corpus-based interpretation of the discourse–cognitive–society triangle on Chinese court judgments

“…Next, vocabulary, phrases, and sentences in the discourse components are further subdivided to explore the quantitative relationship between different social functions and cognitive sources in CCJ. In Models (11)-( 14), the social functions (citation, depiction, distance, and summary) are still taken as the explained variables, and there are ten explanatory variables: Adverbs with high confidence, which reflects the speaker's commitment to the authenticity of the information (Cheng and Sin, 2011;Wu and Cheng, 2020), such as "fundamentally, certainly, and affirmatively" M-ad Adverbs with medium confidence, such as "possibly, approximately, generally" L-ad Adverbs with low confidence, such as "likely, maybe, as if" Phrase Discourse is a hierarchical phenomenon consisting of the form, meaning and action (van Dijk, 2008), and through semantic analysis with Wmatrix3.0 and ConcGram1.0, the prepositional phrase (Pre-P) and verb-object phrase (Ver-P) are used to indicate the cognitive source and social function in CCJ. Pre-P Prepositional phrase, as "according to…" Ver-P Verb-object phrase, as "identify the fact that, determine the fact that…" Sentence Similar to Saussure's utterance, van Dijk's (2008) sentence is a part of social practices, and through semantic analysis with Wmatrix3.0 and ConcGram1.0, the causal clause (Cau-C) and a conditional clause (Con-C) are used to indicate the cognitive source and social function in CCJ Con-C…”

“…Citation from cultural belief plays an essential social function in a court judgment, since the speaker's personal experience is limited, and it is vital to quote other information to support one's ideas (Zhang and Yu, 2003) Dep (depiction) Sensory experience in court judgments refers to the objective information from a speaker who has personally experienced or witnessed (Wu and Cheng, 2020), which conducts a social function of depiction Dis (distance)…”

“…The speech behavior that marks the other voice appearing in the discourse (Thompson, 1996), which means the speaker distances the quoted discourse away oneself through verbal retelling Sum (summary) In court judgments, the logical and reasonable judicial conclusion is derived from one or several known facts or assumptions (Wu and Cheng, 2020), and thus the result of the judgments is a summary of the social behavior in Table 5:…”

“…Through the statistical analysis of CCJ, the vocabularies indicating the cognitive source and social function include verbs and adverbs, among which the verbs consist of speech verbs, sensory verbs, cognitive verbs, and modal verbs, and the adverbs are categorized with the degree of value. The verb is the core of Chinese syntactic and semantic structure (Wu and Cheng, 2020). The general use of different verbs shows the cognitive source of the discourse subject and the attitude to the information mentioned.…”

“…Cheng and Cheng (2014) examine how epistemic modality is employed in civil judgments to construct legal facts and indicate legal probability. From a semiotic perspective, Wu and Cheng (2020) construct a model of evidentiality in Chinese court judgments. Yu (2021) argues that the reporting verbs reflect how judges identify the evidence of different documents in Chinese court judgments.…”