Study On The Meaning Characteristics Extraction And Paraphrase Comparison Of Legal Words

With the continuous improvement and progress of our legal system construction, relation between law and language was also increasingly close. Linguists began to study law language combining with legal practice. In recent years, around the definition, classification, structure,rhetoric and meaning characteristics of legal terminology, scholars had depth and comprehensive studied about it. Based on previous research results and for the text of The Criminal Law of the People’s Republic of China, this paper discussed legal words on two aspects of lexical meaning system and the dictionary paraphrase.First, the legal word was defined with specific legal significance used as the basic standard, namely the word was used in some legal event or used evaluating legal events. The nature of meaning of legal word was analyzed based on the relation among objective things,meaning and thinking. Legal word and Language word both belong to the field of linguistics,with semantic features such as scientificity, systematicness, monosemy, event-ness and evaluativity.Second, with the guidance of the componential analysis method of “one is divided into two parts”, referring to materials such as the statement and judgement of legal cases, the legal word system was described locally, and meaning characteristics of words which were different from each other in some semantic field in natural contexts were analyzed.Then with the guidance of lexicography theory, represented by medium-sized law dictionaries of The Essential Series of Dictionary of Law and The Law Dictionary, the legal words of them were selected as language materials to analyze the paraphrase mode of law dictionaries, and the paraphrase differences of meaning and selection of main precepts were compared with meaning characteristics to analyze differences between the meaning of a word in natural contexts and dictionary definition in the extraction of the meaning characteristics hierarchy. We found that when legal word was paraphrased in a law dictionary, based on meaning characteristics of semantic systems in natural contexts, the distinctive features of itsmeaning were selected in the definition paraphrase and it was described in detail and supplemented in explanatory paraphrase.Finally, by comparing the paraphrase of legal word in The Contemporary Chinese Dictionaryof the six edition and The Essential Series of Dictionary of Law, the differences of these two dictionaries in paraphrase mode, paraphrase content and paraphrase language were summarized, and the differences in word-formation motivation of legal words and language words were interpreted. The principles of systematicness were followed in law dictionary paraphrase, with the use of two paraphrase modes which were “definition paraphrase and explanatory” and paraphrase words with the same features, the scientificity and accuracy of paraphrase were ensured. The principles of simplicity were followed in the language dictionary paraphrase, and it was only one paraphrase mode that was used to interpret the distinctive characteristics of the meaning of a word, which was concise.