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This paper mainly discusses the distribution and rhetorical functions of personal pronouns in English and Chinese legal news reports which is divided into two narrative types, the objective and the semi-dialogic. Through the comparative analysis of some English and Chinese legal news texts in the two types, it finds that the differences in narrative type directly affect the distribution of personal pronouns. In objective narrative, the use of third person pronouns accounts for an absolute proportion, and the frequency of using first person and second person pronouns is close to zero. In semi-dialogic narrative, the use of third person pronouns is still the highest, but only slightly higher than the use of first person and second person pronouns, accounting for only a small number. After analysis, this paper holds that there are three reasons for the uneven distribution: first, the differences between the dialogic style and the narrative style; second, the legal narrative being a story narrative; third, the specific restrictions on the use of legal rhetoric.

Any action has a certain goal, and the judge’s trial discourse is a system of goal with structure and level. Judges usually adopt some discourse strategies to achieve the goal of trial. Based on the court trial corpus collected by us, we find that judges often adopt purposeful discourse strategies to achieve the trial goal and discourse goal, such as question-and-answer strategy, power control strategy, presupposition strategy, repetition strategy and interruption strategy. Strategies actually refer to the means by which to achieve the goal of discourse. Because words are used to express and achieve the goal, the choice of means or strategies depends on the choice of the goal. From this perspective, we can see the relationship between strategy and goal. In a sense, strategy is rhetoric. The purpose of this paper is to study the discourse strategies adopted by judges in Chinese courts from the perspective of the goal principle.