Author(s)

Daohua Hu¹, Changgang Jiang²

¹School of Languages and Cultures, Shanghai University of Political Science and Law, Shanghai, China.
²School of Foreign Languages, Qingdao Agricultural University, Qingdao, China.

In legislative texts, proviso is used to provide for exceptions or to add certain conditions to the provisions in the main clause. In Chinese legislative texts, proviso is called danshu, for it is initiated by the words dan/danshi. The linguistic expressions of danshu have not been fully described. This study, based on a self-built mini-corpus of danshu of Chinese legislative texts, aims to describe the linguistic expressions of danshu, summarize the syntactic patterns and core words thereof, and explain the reasons. This study will shed light on the normalization of Chinese legislative texts, especially the linguistic expressions of danshu, improve the quality of Chinese legislation, and enrich the study of provisos in legislative texts other than those in English language.

Linguistic Expressions, Danshu (Provisos), Chinese Laws, Syntactic Pattern, Lexis, Civil Code¹

Hu, D. and Jiang, C. (2021) The Linguistic Expressions of Danshu (Provisos) in Chinese Laws. Open Journal of Modern Linguistics, 11, 395-414. doi: 10.4236/ojml.2021.113030.