A Linguistic Study On Fuzziness And Defuzzication Of Legal Language

Law is the demonstration of national power and the guarantee of a stable society. Legal language has been always regarded as the most rigorous language use. Without rigorousness and exactness, law will be in lack of compulsory power and authority. However, fuzziness is still ubiquitous in legal language, especially legislative language. In order to broaden the application scope of legal regulations, the legislators increase the flexibility of legal language because they cannot anticipate all of the possible happenings in legal activities. Therefore, fuzziness in legal language is necessary and unavoidable.The research on fuzzy language originates from Fuzzy Set Theory, proposed by L. A. Zadeh, an American Professor of the University of California at Berkeley. In the paper Fuzzy Sets published in Information and Control, he pointed out that subjects in the real world usually do not have very exactly definite boundaries. From then on, fuzziness has been applied in various areas including linguistics.The application of fuzziness in language is usually called fuzzy language. There are different kinds of expressions of fuzziness. The first type is hedges, i.e. the words of phrases affixed to the expressions that convey exact meanings so that the exact meanings become fuzzy. The second type is the words and expressions that are fuzzy themselves. And the third type is fuzzy implicature, which is used to convey fuzzy concepts with exact forms. Although fuzziness is indispensable in legal language, the final goal of courtroom is to arrive at a definite decision to maintain the justice and authority of law and the steadiness of the society. Therefore it is of great importance to explore the process of defuzzication, especially in courtroom activities.This dissertation is divided into six chapters. Chapter 1 is the introduction. It sketches the previous and present research on legal language, and the purpose, significance and organization of this dissertation. Chapter 2 introduces the causes of fuzziness in legal natural and language, and how to distinguish fuzziness between ambiguity. Chapter 3 will make analysis on the fuzziness in legal language with semantic theories. Chapter 4 digs into the pragmatic fuzziness in legal language. Chapter 5 is about how to transfer the fuzziness in legal language into the definiteness...