On Judicial Reasoning from the Perspective of Thematic Progression

Judicial judgments are the written records of legal proceedings. In nature, it is on the condition that the judge engages himself in the task of judicial reasoning in the form of deductive reasoning by finding legal material facts and applying legal norms in point that the judge makes a judicial decision. On the basis of the five patterns of thematic progression proposed by Danes (1974) and the four patterns of thematic progression advanced by Xu Shenghuan (1982), as well as the nine logical relations between theme components and rheme components threading a coherent discourse, which are put forward in the present study, a (According to the court, ...)text extracted from a well -formed civil case judgment in China is analyzed and interpreted with regard to how it accomplishes a judicial reasoning filled with legal-premise-oriented substantive reasoning in the form of deductive reasoning. The significance of the present study lies in its direct goal to shed insightful implication and enlightment on the current argumentativegenre- oriented reform of judicial judgments in China from a forensic linguistic perspective.