Semantic Analysis Of The Legal Language

This thesis explores the interdisciplinary aspect of the language and the law. As isknown, besides the actual execution, the law is much of a language prescribing thebehaviors in the society. From this perspective, the possible research orientation whichcombines the legal language and the linguistics is apt as a topic. Furthermore, the legallanguage involves a great demand on explaining the legal texts and cases, which can bereflected on the complex semantics of the language. The distinct features of the legallanguage, such as archaic words and complicated sentence structures, are the surfacedemonstrations of the compact information load embed in the lines. This essay attempts tounravel the implicit message in the language via formal and lexical semantic approach.Semantics has developed into several subdivisions, each presenting greatenlightenments to the linguistics. Among these branches, the formal semantics is closelyintertwined with the logical science; something mathematical is involved to dissect thecodes in the language. The method of translating the ordinary language into logicallanguage provides the convenient tool to semantically analyze the language structure, howthe meaning mutually affects one another, how the meaning are constructed as a whole, etc.The formal semantic research concerns greatly with the truth condition of the literalexpression and the actual denotation in the objective universe. This essay will adopt theformal means to analyze the legal language, just providing a very preliminary and tentativeresearch on the language; even so, it is worthy.Then the sub-discipline of lexical semantics is another in-depth orientation of thelinguistic semantics. The lexical semantics dives into the more micro unit of the language,the lexemes. It discusses the lexical relations of the individual words, this proposes that thesemantic system is web in which one item is related with another in some special ways. Asfor the lexemes, another theory that deserves attention is the Generative Lexicon, proposedby Pustejovsky. In the lexical semantics, the complementary polysemy is one focus thatgenerative lexicon theory tackles. It examines the various aspects of the individual word, such as the event structure, the argument structure and so on, then judging from thesurrounding lexemes, the final proper meaning is determined.This essay also takes some concrete measures to analyze the sentences in the legaltexts, from both the formal and the lexical semantic perspectives. In the process, thecharacteristics of the legal texts are exhibited and further lexical and formal semanticanalyses are conducted consecutively. Anyhow, the analysis presents a glimpse to theinternal structure of the legal language.This essay also reviews on a wide range of literature regarding the theories andopinion on the characters of the legal language, the theories of lexical and formalsemantics, and the interdisciplinary theories in the forensic linguistics. It is on these basesthat the content of the essay is extended widely.In conclusion, the linguistic theory can be applied in the study of legal languages,more specifically, the formal and lexical semantic study can provide instrumentalinformation to the linguistics and the linguistics can also provide some guidance to theamelioration of the legal language.