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Title:
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Discourse Analysis of Legal Discourse with Reference to Dickens, Cozzens, Kafka, Lee, and Melville
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Author:
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Heba Aboul-Enein
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Email:
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click here to access email
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Degree Awarded:
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Ain Shams University
, Department of English
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Degree Date:
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1999
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Linguistic Subfield(s):
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Discourse Analysis
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Subject Language(s):
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Arabic, Standard
English
French
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Director(s):
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Nadia Khorshid
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Abstract:
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Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is a theory that examines and analyzes power asymmetry in discourse. It depicts instances of injustices in social interaction, and aims at raising people's consciousness of them. Hence, it is a democratic approach to language. The thesis applies this theory to legal discourse, in an effort to shed light on the linguistic forms that create an unequal balance of relations between professionals and non-professionals in English, Egyptian and French legal discourses. For this particular purpose, English, French, and Arabic legal texts, statutes, contracts, and trials are examined from the semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic points of view, following a CDA framework. Moreover, the thesis undertakes to prove that legal literary trials are equal to real ones, following Fowler's approach to literature as social discourse. Thus, English and Arabic legal literary trials are also analyzed. The thesis is divided into four chapters. The first chapter offers a general background of the theory of critical discourse analysis and definition of terms in this theory. Moreover, it briefs on the concept of law and legal theories from both historical and social perspectives. The second chapter examines different semantic issues like the use of synonymy, antonymy, and hyponymy in English and Arabic real and literary discourses. The chapter also presents analyses of metaphors, similes and other figures of speech in Arabic and English legal discourses. The third chapter offers an examination of different processes in the three languages, mental, material, verbal, etc. and underlines the use of passivization and nominalization in these legal discourses. In addition, it studies the use of modals, imperatives, and subordination in the three languages. Chapter four projects the use of or the violation of the CP and the PP in English and Egyptian courts and projects different examples on turn-taking from both courts. Finally, different speech acts in English and Egyptian discourses are examined and the promulgation formula is studied with reference to the Egyptian, French, Canadian, Russian Albanian, and Bosnian Statutes.
The results reveal that the legal discourses of these languages are greatly similar in their contents of laws, being tools of social (in)justice and control. Moreover, the linguistic means to accomplish such social goals, whether semantic, syntactic or pragmatic, are analogous. In addition, the literary works under study show the commitment of many literary writers to follow real legal linguistic forms in their works, hence, there is no literary discourse per se; rather it is a true representation of reality.
The thesis offers different recommendations to alleviate power asymmetry in legal encounters, and to raise people's consciousness of their laws. Of these suggestions are the following. Laws should be taught in different universities to inform students of the legal principles and procedures of their countries. Legal programs should also be projected on TV. Such programs can guide people to act properly in awkward situations, therefore, they learn their laws and avoid destroying their careers with unlawful acts.
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