The Stylistic Features Of Legal English And Plain English Movement

As we all know for a long time, there is seemingly always a great impassible gap between law and ordinary people. Law or its embodied form, statute, is always written in a language and style far beyond the comprehensibility of ordinary people. When we found our rights and benefits breached, we need to protect our rights resorting to law. Therefore, law must be clear and understandable so that every citizen even with no legal education can take it as a weapon to safeguard our own interests to the largest extent. The simplification of language has become an irresistible trend, so as in legal language. Since 1970s, Plain English Movement has arisen in western countries. The movement pushes forward the stylistic changes of legal documents. The precise and plain language is helpful to enhance the effect and efficiency of legal documents. In some suitable context, we can convert the language from sophistication to simplicity and employ the simplified language to make the whole writing clear, concise and persuasive.This thesis is aimed to reveal the significance of using plain legal language in the law making process and make such initial suggestions as how to improve readability of statutes by using plain legal language. In view of the stylistic features of legal English, the language techniques on lexical and syntactic level have been proposed for the simplification of legal English.The thesis is divided into five chapters. The first chapter will be a general introduction of the whole thesis and some related concepts, including the definition on legal English and plain legal English. The second chapter will introduce the concepts of style and stylistics, which are followed by stylistic features of legal English. In the third chapter, the author will mainly have a concrete review of the historical development of the "Plain English Movement" all around the world and give a discussion on the old and new criticism on it. The fourth chapter will put forward the techniques of using plain legal language so as to make a piece of statute much more easily understood and accessible to ordinary people. And the last chapter is a summary of the whole thesis, the significance of this study, especially the practical value of this study and the limitations of this thesis for further research to improve.