A Semantic Approach To The Legal Lexical Learning

It is noted that law students need to study both large corpus of cases, statutes, legal principles and learn the language of law which is filled with distinctive archaisms, jargons and terms. Particularly, when confronted with learning the laws of other countries with a second language as a media, law students often encounter great many difficulties and challenges. The writer of this thesis intends to adopt a semantic approach and take such theories as the semantic field, componential analysis to provide the law students with some learning strategies to facilitate their legal lexical learning.The thesis is divided into five chapters. The first chapter explains the relationship between language and the law, and points out that language is crucial not only to the law but to the legal education as well. In this chapter, the research history and the status quo of the relations between language and the law are introduced, and some influential works in this aspect are cited and briefly evaluated with the purpose of presenting some practical value and significance for the present endeavors.The second chapter is a review of the relevant theories or methodology which will be applied in this thesis. The method of componential analysis is introduced in the first part. Background information and examples are given for further explanation, some famous scholars who contributed in this area are named, and the advantages of the method are exhibited. The second part introduces the theory of semantic field and Trier's basic tenets about this theory. In addition, the advantages and disadvantages of this theory are illuminated. The third part mainly concerns semantic relations and their classification. Three kinds of semantic relations are mentioned, namely, synonymy, antonymy, and hyponymy. The fourth part discusses five features of the semantic field, namely the hierarchical feature, the interwoven feature, the relative feature, the variable feature and the national feature. In the end of the chapter, graphing method is also introduced as an auxiliary method to apply the above -mention theories or methodology to the lexical learning.The third chapter mainly discusses legal language learning strategies (hereinafter referred to as LLLS), including the research history, the status quo, the definition and the content of LLLS, the characteristics of LLLS, the functions of LLLS, and the learning strategy instruction.The fourth chapter focuses on the application of these semantic methods and theories in the legal lexical learning. The writer distinguishes between the ordinary sense and legal sense of a word, and then introduces how to apply the method of componential analysis in distinguishing legal synonyms. The third part deals with antomras in the legal language. It points out that legal English learners can remember legal words and understand the exact meaning of them by antonymous pairs which often appear in the legal context. This chapter suggests using graphing method combined with the theory of semantic field to accumulating as many as possible legal lexical words and strengthen learners' memory and understanding. After the elaboration, the writer discusses several learning strategies of legal language instruction, in which the five steps are involved and some designed exercises are suggested and explained respectively.In the last chapter, a conclusion is reached that the semantic approach can facilitate the legal lexical learning. In addition, it further advances some problem waiting to be solved in future research.