Critical Stylistic Analysis Of Legal English

The present study employs the theory and research method of Critical Stylistics and it takes ten reports from the Supreme Court of U.S.A to testify the language deviation of legal English.It holds that language deviation causes the ability difference among people,and this finally forms the unfairness on the language right. However,the phenomenon has not drawn enough attention of the scholars,and the object of the present study is to testify that the deviation of legal English is closely related to legal power,and the power is dominated by certain ideology.Legal English,as one of the variants of English,has many different features by comparison with common use of English,and these features are the focus of scholars. However,scholars tend to pay their attention to the technical issues,such as "what is" or "how to achieve",and their purpose is to provide the language service for the lawyers.Why does legal English has the special features and how does the feature function,are left not researched.The study wants to probe into the deep reasons in this aspect.As for the method,the present study takes the form of a case study and employs both qualitative and quantitative means to explore the deviation of legal English. Combining the two methods,the present study finds that legal English deviates from the common use of English to a large extent,and the language deviation results in the weak and strong groups among people in using legal English.The present study holds that legal English deprives the language right of the majority of people,while it offers language privileges to some other people.The study testifies the objective proposed at the beginning of the study,and it also analyzes and evaluates the reasons for the deviation of legal English.Based on these,the study points out the potential ideology hidden behind legal English,and it also offers the operative means to solve the unfairness of law.The study could be divided into six chapters.The first chapter introduces the motivation,the objectives and method of research of present study.The second Chapter is the literature review of stylistics,it defines the concept of stylistics and it also sets the scope of its research,and it also offers the theoretical framework of present study.Chapter three is the preparation for discussion in the present study.It defines some concepts which are important for the present study.And it also introduces some background information.Chapter four is the deviation analysis of legal English in perspectives of lexicon,syntax and the text with qualitative and quantitative methods.Chapter five is the discussion of the discovery in chapter four, and it also analyzes the distribution of language right in situation of language deviation.Besides,it also talks about the potential ideology for language deviation. Chapter six is the conclusion,which holds that the simplification of legal English is in necessity in order to achieve the authentic fairness.There are also limitations in the present study.Firstly,the study just takes the reports as a case study to analyze the language deviation.However,the reports are only a small portion in legal English,and the present study tries to talk about the common features of legal English with the reports,which must be taken as a drawback.Ideology,of course,is an important reason for the deviation of legal English.However,there must be other elements,such as history,politics and so on, and these are not discussed in the present study.