A Pragmatic Study Of Vague Expressions In Legal English

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 involves both linguistics and the science of law. As the tool of adjusting people's behavior, legal English should be as precise as possible. However, vague expressions can be found virtually everywhere in legal language.In recent years, this phenomenon has been discussed by many scholars both at home and abroad. Much progress has been made which has provided valuable materials for the study. However, as a relatively new branch, vagueness of legal English still remains mysterious to many people. The author thinks that it is quite necessary to explore the vague expressions in legal English.On the basis of contemporary studies, this thesis mainly analyzes the vague expressions in legal English from pragmatic perspective. Legal English is of high-precision. The motivation of choosing vague expressions in this highly precise language is worth exploring. And the Adaptation Theory provides a sound theoretical explanation for the choice of vague expressions. According to Verschueren's Adaptation Theory, employment of vague language in legislation is the result of legislators'linguistic choice and linguistic adaptation. In this thesis, the motivation of choosing vague expressions in legal English is investigated from two aspects of adaptation-structural objects of adaptation and contextual correlates of adaptation. As for structural objects of adaptation, Legislators'choice of vague expressions from every dimension of structure in legislative language achieves the adaptation to structural objects of legal language. As for the contextual correlates of adaptation, contextual correlates-social world, mental world and physical world have impact on legislators when they are using language. Legislators'choice of vague expressions reveals the adaptation to the three non-linguistic contexts. The use of vague expressions in judicial English is relatively flexible and tactical. A manifestation of this flexibility is that vague language is used by participants of legal speech communication to achieve certain communicative goals. The author explains how to achieve the communicative goals by the use of vague expressions in its violation of the Cooperative Principle and the observation of Politeness Principle. It is proved that in legal speech communication, vague language is an efficient communicative strategy to convey the speaker's intended meaning and achieve certain communicative effects such as deliberately withholding information, politeness, using language persuasively, self-protection and lacking specific information.The pragmatic analysis of vagueness in legal English in this thesis will not only enrich and develop the current studies on vagueness in legal English but will also be helpful for the interpretation and application of legal English.This thesis consists of five chapters. Before Chapter one is the introduction, in which the generality of vagueness, the significance of studying vague expressions in legal language and the issues to be studied are generally introduced. Chapter one is literature review, which generally reviews the previous studies on vagueness and legal English as well as vague expressions in legal English. Chapter two mainly discusses the necessity and realization of vague expressions in legal English. Chapter three is about the theories for vagueness analysis in legal English. Since this thesis intends to explore vague expressions from a pragmatic perspective, Language Adaptation Theory as well as Cooperative Principle and Politeness Principle are adopted. Chapter four discusses the application of vagueness in legal English within the framework of LAT, CP and PP. In chapter five the pragmatic functions of vague expressions in legal English are discussed. The conclusion part summarizes the thesis and points out the limitations and implications of the study...