On Vagueness Of Legal English Lexica

Legal English is the language of law in the UK, the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and other countries whose official language is English. As a type of legal language, it is a frontier science with overlap of linguistics and the science of law. As the tool of adjusting people's behavior, legal English should be as precise as possible. On the contrary, vague expressions in legal texts can be found virtually everywhere.In recent years, this phenomenon has been realized and discussed by many scholars both at home and abroad. To date, much progress has been achieved, which has provided precious material for the study of vagueness. However, as a relatively new branch with the requirement of knowledge of both linguistics and law, there is still a very long way to go. Vagueness of legal English still remains a little bit mysterious to most people. Moreover, quite a number of people still consider vagueness in law contra-scientific and they even suggest the removal of it.Concerning the current research situation, the author thinks that it is quite necessary to attempt a full description of vagueness of legal English lexica especially in the light of some theories so as to prove its existence, which is just one of the aims of this thesis.What distinguishes this thesis from previous ones is that it adopts the cognitive category theory to illustrate the objective existence of vagueness in legal English lexica. Another innovative point lies with the discussion between vagueness and precision. Most previous articles only focus on vagueness itself but somehow ignore a certain description of its relationship with precision.Language material used is mainly from legal texts especially from the Constitution of the United States of America and the Uniform Commercial Code of America. The reason why the author mainly chooses these two is that they are among the most representative ones in the law field. Besides, it is relatively easy for the author to get access to them. Another reason for the limited amount of material is that...