Stylistic Analysis Of Tax Law English

The thesis intends to analyze the style of Tax Law English. The thesis, with forensic stylistics and register theories, focuses on the stylistic features of the language of British Income Tax Law from three levels: lexicon, syntax and textual structure. It is expected to shed some light on understanding the legislative documents of Tax Law. Legal English is a special mode of expression and a norm developed by a long practice of judicature in the common law countries. In the west, forensic stylistics mainly concerns the research of courtroom discourse and the language of lawyers. Many famous researchers, such as Tiersma, Bhatia, Mellinkoff, Gibbons, Hale and so forth, have done a lot of relevant researches. However, Tiersma (1999) proposes that legal English research is usually limited to criminal and civil law language areas. In China, the stylistic research of legal language is still at the initial stage. Up to now, many researchers still pay great attention to the study of the general stylistic features of legal English.Summing up the stylistic research of legal English abroad and at home, we find that the current research is mainly limited to some professional legislative documents which are addressed to a group of specialists, and that it seldom pays attention to the stylistic features of the documents in economic law, such as tax law, which is directed to the public. Tax law plays an important role in a country's economic and social life. Any person can become a taxpayer only if he or she has taxable income. However, up to now, there is no relevant research or papers on the stylistic analysis of tax law language. The stylistic study of tax law English has long been neglected. Thus it is significant to explore the stylistic features of tax law English and to understand, grasp and apply the style.Qing Xiubai (2002) says that stylistic analysis is built on the basis of linguistic description. The representation effect and communicative functions of language in specific social contexts are always realized through specific phone, vocabularies, syntax, grapheme, and textual structure. We can grasp the true meaning of a specific text precisely and perceive its representation effect by analyzing its stylistic features. Vijay K. Bahatia(1993) suggests three levels of linguistic analysis: (1) analysis of lexico-grammatical features;(2) analysis of...