The Lexical Characteristics Of Legal English

The present thesis is an attempt to discover the characteristics of legal English, particularly its lexical characteristics. In the present thesis, the characteristics of legal English are divided into two categories: general characteristics in broad line and lexical characteristics, both of which form an independent chapter. One chapter is devoted to the implication. And the whole thesis, plus an introduction and a conclusion, is thus made up of five chapters as follows.Chapter one presents an introduction to law, style and legal English. The writer introduces various definitions or interpretations of the term "style". Many words are used to describe the requirements of language to law because any analysis of the language in an area of specialized application should start with an inquiry into the circumstances of that application. Law innature is a tool by which particular outside efforts__ the state authority__ impose andmaintain order in human affairs. As law represents the state power, it ought to be solemn, scared and compulsive, which calls for a special variety of language to embody such characteristics. The nature and characteristics of law determine the language of law as being formal, precise and accurate.The syntactic options in legal English are dealt in Chapter Two. In fact, the second chapter is a survey of legal English from the grammatical perspective with a view to analyzing the most prominent grammatical characteristics of legal English. In this chapter, the writer conducts an overall syntactical study of declarative sentence, complete sentence, passive voice, simple present tense, long sentence, and nominalization in the field of the English language of law.And in Chapter Three, attention is focused on the main body of this thesis, that is, the lexical characteristics of legal English. The writer carries out the study of lexical characteristics in ten aspects. Two subsections are related to the origin of legal lexicon: words from Old and Middle English, words and phrases from Latin and from Old French. Seven...