The Stylistic Features Of Legal English

Law means the principles, rules, and regulations set up by a government, the authority, or by custom, that apply to all the people of a group; a system or collection of such principle and rules of a country that is ruled by law. Legal English refers to a kind of English variety employed in legislation, judicature and the enforcement of laws. Law is generally expressed by some specific forms, such as constitution, statutes, regulations, stipulations, orders, rules etc. In the contemporary highly legalized society, laws are closely concerned with people's economic activities. Thus to know the stylistic features of legal English is of great significance to learners of legal English or workers of the legal profession, such as lawyers, judges and translators.In this thesis, I have made a relatively systematic and objective study of those particular linguistic features and their stylistic effects of legal texts so that the readers may appreciate and make the best use of legal English, and the writers may use it cleverly and effectively.Based on the previous studies, this paper takes legal documents as the object of study, chooses examples from books, and by means of stylistic analysis, investigates those particular linguistic features and their stylistic effects of legal texts at phonological, lexical, syntactical levels. They are as follows: the wide use of archaisms, the use of reduplication of synonyms and near-synonyms, parallel structure, special use of common words and modal verbs, the simple present tense, declarative sentence, complete sentence, passive voice, subjunctive mood, the use of loose sentence and periodic sentence etc. Generally speaking, all these marked linguistic features are formal, elevated, accurate, and authoritative.