Abstract：Judicial judgments are 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.The theory of thematic progression is concerned with the connections and developments of inter-sentential themes and rhemes in coherent discourse, which play a decisive role in organizing intra-sentence components and sequencing component sentences and therefore determine the semantic orientation of the whole text. According to the newly proposed textual framework of thematic progression which operates on the two textual dimensions—that is, the horizontal temporality dimension and the vertical theme-rheme logical relation dimension, with a qualitative method, an “According to the court, …” text extracted from a well-formed civil case judgment in China is analyzed and interpreted in relation to how it accomplishes a judicial reasoning filled with legal-premise-oriented substantive reasoning in the form of deductive reasoning.
2010, Vol. 1 
浙公网安备 33011802000512号