A Study Of Vagueness In Legal Language

Vagueness is one of the most important characteristics of natural language. The concept of vagueness was first proposed by the American professor Zadeh in his article entitled Fuzzy Sets. In China, Professor Wu Tieping is the first scholar who studies the vague theories systematically and published the famous book Vague Language. However, researches on the vagueness combined with other variety of language like legal language and advertising language are still limited.Law exists everywhere in our life. Language is the carrier of law and law is embodied through language. Vagueness is an important characteristic of language, so law is surely to be influenced by vagueness. The distinctive features of legal language are preciseness and accuracy. However in practice, hedges are common in legal language. In some situations, vague expressions are adopted in legal language to make the language more accurate and general in substance. This thesis, based on the previous study, is going to analyze vagueness in legal language from semantic and pragmatic perspectives and the reason for the vagueness in legal language, classify the vagueness in legal language from the semantic perspectives, expatiate on the positive and negative function of the vagueness in legal language by using the Cooperative Principle, Politeness Principle and Relevance Theory, and thus points out that vague expressions play an important role in legal language.This thesis consists of four chapters. Chapter 1 gives a brief introduction of vagueness, including the review of fuzzy linguistics, the previous study of vagueness from five aspects, and it provides the definitions of vagueness and gives the reasons of existence of vague language from four aspects. Chapter 2 sketches out the development and the current situation of the legal language, points out the characteristics of legal language and explains the reasons for vagueness in legal language. Chapter 3 explores the vagueness in legal language from a semantic point of view. It explores the linguistic realization of the vagueness in legal language mainly on the lexical level and comes up with the categorizations of the vague lexes and expressions that are frequently used in law. Chapter 4 begins with an introduction to some pragmatic principles including Cooperative Principle, Politeness Principle and Relevance Theory and discusses the vagueness in legal language within the framework of these theories and then sums up the functions of vagueness in legal language. The last part of the thesis is the conclusion, including a summary of this thesis and a discussion on the implication and limitations of my research in this field.