A Study Of Vagueness In Legal Language

It has been a long time since people began their researches on vagueness phenomenon. Although we put great emphasis on using precise language, the scholars find out that it is easier for people to communicate by using vague language. In 1965 American Professor Zadeh proposed the "Fuzzy Set Theory" in which he pointed out that objects in the real world usually do not have sharply defined boundaries. The theory leads to a further and systematic study in vagueness and since then it has aroused attention from many fields and is rapidly applied to many disciplines such as artificial intelligence, computer science, psychology and linguistics. In China, Professor Wu Tieping is the first scholar who studies the vague theories in linguistics systematically. According to their theories and other relevant studies, we know vagueness is unavoidably involved in language.As a special type of communication, law is also expressed by language. Though the research on vagueness in legal language is relatively a new one, there have been a lot of achievements in the study of legal language in the past decades. This thesis, based on the previous studies, explores the vagueness in legal language from a semantic and pragmatic perspective. It covers some indefinable words and words with vague connotations which widely used in legal texts. Vagueness in legal language is also analyzed from pragmatic perspective through using Cooperative Principle and Politeness Principle. It can be concluded that vague words and expressions used in legal language either follow or flout certain maxims of the Cooperative Principle or observe certain maxims of the Politeness Principle to achieve certain effects in communication.Vagueness is a common phenomenon in legal language and its proper application can serve certain purposes. The proper use of vague language can help the lawmakers to adapt to the changeable circumstances in legislation and leave much flexibility for lawyers and the other people related to legal activities to accomplish particular communicative goals. In the end of the thesis, the author mainly puts forward these two ways to use vagueness in legal language.