Impact Of The Context On Legislative Language

This paper tends to probe into the impact of the context on legislative language. Since Saussure,the living and vivid human language was researched as a rigid system of grammar.Chomsky's generative grammar further excludes social and cultural elements out of the linguistic research.Although there is contextual study of language since the emergence of human language,the true sense of contextual study is started by Bronislaw Malinowski.Since the founding of London School,the study of human language on the base of social and cultural background is reintroduced into the language research.According to Firth,context is the determinant of types of discourse, the change of context will consequently give rise to the change of meaning and format of human language.It is Firth's first abstraction of context of situation that makes people not only pay attention to various context ingredients,but also clearly aware of the change of meaning where context changes.A certain context relates to a form of language.The meaning and form of language change with context.It is the greatest achievement and milestone of context study.It not only pays attention to the construct and interpretation of meaning but also explicates the impact of context on language structure and function.Halliday,the most distinguished,categorizes context into three ingredients:field of discourse,tenor of discourse and mode of discourse.He thinks that context impacts the ideational,interpersonal and textual function.His theory attracts a lot of attention of linguists both at home and abroad.Hu Zhuanglin,Zhu Yongsheng,Xu Yuchen and so on furthered his research of context from different angles.As a special register,legal language is always reprimanded by layman.Legal language is regarded as a kind of foreign language by some people.Plain Language Movement starts from United Kingdom.Since then,the disadvantaged began to struggle for language equality.Legal language,as a special register,is severely criticized.After many years reform,legal language is relatively pain now,but still there is complaint of its technicality.It can be seen the relation between plainness and technicality is dialectic.In accordance with Halliday and other theory of context,this paper holds that legislative language can be plainer but still it has to be professional.The impact of context on legislative language is objective.Legislators can not betray this rule.There are five chapters in this paper.The first part is introductive.The second and third chapters are literature review of legislative research and context research respectively. The fourth chapter will focus on the impact of context on legislative language.The last chapter is a conclusion.