Vagueness In Legal English

This paper aims to analyze the vagueness in legal language and expound on the influence this linguistic phenomenon gives to the law.It is composed of three parts. The first part gives a general introduction to the Legal English and its main stylistic features, among which, precision is of paramount importance. Law is the embodiment of state power, and only when accurate and rigorous words are used to draft legislation without loopholes, can legislation provide all people in society with behavioral mode or standard, really playing the role of regulating and measuring people's juristic acts, so that the aim of 'rule of law' can be realized. To achieve the purpose of precision, various ways are used in legal English, and they are explained from the lexical and grammatical perspectives respectively.The second part is the main body of this dissertation. This part provides a detailed explanation of the vagueness in legal language. In the first section, the Fuzzy Set Theory of L. A. Zadeh, and Fuzzy Linguistics are introduced and it is elucidated that vagueness is an important and inborn feature of natural language. As a variation of natural language, legal English is no exception. In the second section, the definition of vagueness and its central characteristics are given. In the third section, the vagueness in legal language is analyzed from the semantic perspective. The fourth section provides three reasons for the existence of vagueness in legal English. They are the requirement of the legislation, the communication difficulty caused by the cultural, educational, social background, etc and the expectations of the changing society.In Part Three, further analysis of vagueness in legal English is made from the view of the dialectical relationship between precision and vagueness.Precision and vagueness in Legal English differ from each other and contradict each other. On the other hand, they complement each other, and under certain circumstances, they can convert into each other.