Vagueness In Legal Language: From Semantic And Pragmatic Points Of View

In this thesis, the author challenges the misconception that vagueness in legal language is undesirable and should be eliminated completely. A number of legal texts such as Constitution of the People's Republic of China, Criminal Law of the People's Republic of China and Contract Law of the People's Republic of China are chosen as the data for analysis. The linguistic approach is adopted to make a comprehensive analysis of the vagueness in law to find out the pragmatic implications and functions of vagueness in legal language. And both the descriptive and qualitative methods are adopted to address the topic. The author starts from exploring the linguistic realization of the vagueness in legal language mainly on the lexical level and comes up with the categorizations of the vague lexis and expressions that are frequently used in law. Besides, the problem resulted in by the vagueness in meaning is also discussed. For example the indeterminacy in legal interpretation is one area that may cause difficulty. Based on the semantic study of the vagueness in legal language, the author analyzes the pragmatic implications of the vague language in law on the basis of Grice's Cooperative Principle and Brown and Levinson's Politeness theory. This part shows the true intentions of the legislators in using vague lexis and expressions. Finally pragmatic functions of the vagueness in law are summarized. The author finds out that the vagueness in legal language is not only unavoidable but can serve certain purposes if used appropriately.