This paper firstly classifies performative verbs in legal texts into assertives, expressives, declaratives, directives, litigatives, commisives and collaboratives,based on John Searle 's,Geoffrey Leech 's,and Jürgen Habermas ' theories and the general features of legal texts. Then a one-million-character corpus is built with random samples from a collection of current legal texts in Mainland China, which are classified into 3 groups in line with domestic and international laws,department laws,substantive and adjective laws. After POS taggin...