The subject of this paper is the language usage within legal discourse, with the corpus sourced from the legislation of the People’s Republic of China. Zhang Deming (1989) believes that “register is a scientific term in the category of language stylistics, a ‘functional style’ of language formed due to different communicative functions of language use. This system has a series of commonalities in linguistic materials (elements) and rhetorical methods, and there are a series of differences and corresponding patterns between different systems.” According to his view, the legal register has distinctive features which differ from other registers. This paper describes and interprets the syntactic, lexical, and register aspects of legal discourse, along with the linguistic style inherent in legal language.

This article aims to examine what kinds of non-linguistic parameters correlate with the variations of the sentence-ending styles used in television news. Specifically, we focus on shifting between Hapsyo-style and Haeyo-style, two dominant kinds uttered in the register, and the variations in Haeyo, based on the results from the analysis of a news corpus. It turned out that whereas the two styles are both used, Haeyo is used much less than Hapsyo in the news. In the use of Haeyo as opposed to Hapsyo, the three different parameters such as the gender of the speaker, the role of the speaker, and the type of the news item are shown to have significant correlations. That is, the values of women, anchors, and the type of news items for specific hearers, have positive correlation to the use of Haeyo, contrary to the values of men, reporters, and the type of news items for abstract hearers. The parameter which have the strongest correlation to the use of Haeyo turned out to be the types of news items, followed by the role of speaker, and the gender of the speaker are shown to be the weakest one. Regarding the variations among the different forms belonging to Haeyo, we examined the diversity of the endings used, with special attention to the proportion of the endings originated from clause-linkers, and it turned out that the role of speaker and the type of news items are significant parameters, among which the former is relatively more relevant.