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

Abstract

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.