On Precision And Vagueness Of Legal English Lexica

As we all know, legal English is much more precise than ordinary English in that legal language deals with what is closely related to people's benefits, and law is the essential guarantee to stable social development. If legal language were not precise enough, misconceptions of law would arise, thus inflicting great losses on individual benefits, and upsetting social balance. In that case, social development would be impossible.Legal English, though more precise than ordinary English, is subject to misconceptions due to its vagueness, and therefore it has some room for improvement in terms of accuracy. This paper aims at analyzing the vagueness and precision in legal English lexica as lexica are the elementary unit of language. It explores the origin of legal English and the balance between vagueness and precision with a view to sorting out issues on how to make legal English plainer to understand, avoid the use of obsolete lexica, and reach a balance between vagueness and precision. Chapter 1 relates the origin of legal English in order to make readers familiar with the source of legal English. Chapter 2 introduces the status quo of legal English from several aspects. It relates the present accomplishments in the research of legal English, paving the way for the following issues. Chapters3 analyzes the precision of legal English. It is divided into 7 parts, including avoiding pronouns, legal archaisms, use of such instead of this and that, homonyms, synonyms, use of wishee, escapee, and laughee, and legal slang, in which precision of legal English is greatly detailed. Chapter4 analyzes the vagueness in legal English, which includes: legal nominalizations, flexible, general, or vague lexica and the tradeoff between flexibility and precision. Because the vagueness of legal English does exist, this part is also detailed. In the end of this part, the tradeoff between legal English and ordinary English is put forward, attempting to persuade legal professions to apply plain English instead of unintelligible English. The corresponding distinctive interpretations between legal English and ordinary English is explored in the last part aiming to solve the problem of misunderstandings of legal English.