对法律英语文本语言精确性的初探(英文)

Abstract: The language of legal English is a regulatory. Precision is the foremost feature among all of the properties of legal English. The paper draws a conclusion in an all round way of the accuracy of legal English from the prospective of lexicon, semantic, syntax in legal English documents.The research has little use for legal English learners and relevant workers.

Key words: Legal English; Legal language; Precision

摘  要：法律语言具有规约性，精确性是法律英语语言的灵魂，本文通过对法律英语文本语言精确性特点的词汇，语义及句法方面的分析，比较全面地总结和归纳了法律英语的精确性特点。本研究望能对法律英语的学习者和工作者有所帮助。

关键词：法律英语；法律语言；精确性

Introduction
Legal English means the language used by law practitioners and jurists of common law system in the countries whose official language is English, such as Canada, Australia, India, New Zealand, and some African countries. These common law system countries have a history of about several hundred years to express law in English [1]. (Maley, 1994:13)
Huang Yongping (2004:29) offers his own definition as follows: Legal English in the customary language used by drafters, legislators, lawyers, judges, litigants, law enforcers, and other law users in the common law jurisdictions where English is the legally sanctioned official or nationwide-used language [2].
It seems that the definitions are generally in common with an emphasis on the specific user — people in English –speaking countries and a specific area — the law field.
Legal English is a type of legal language, a frontier science with overlap of linguistics and the science of law. There is not one discourse but a set of related legal discourses (Maley, 1994:13). Legal English could be classified into three major discourse, they are: legislative discourse, courtroom discourse and judicial discourse. Like English for science and technology, medical English, commercial English, financial English, advertising English and so on，legal English belongs to the category of English for Specific Purposes (Tom, ＆ Water, 2002:16) [3]. Therefore, we can say that legal English belongs to the category of applied linguistics. It is based on the general English with its own stylistic features.
As a sort of Specialized texts, laws has its own features, so are legal translation. Legal translation has its own lexical features such as preference for formal and big words, frequent employment of archaic and loan words and phrases, common words with special meaning; semantic features such as repetition of words for accuracy, frequent use of synonyms and parallel structure, preference for nominalization precision of expression, the illocutionary act; and grammatical features such as Frequent employment of long complicate sentences and objective composition of declarative sentences.

1  The lexical precision in Legal English documents
In order to avoid any possible confusion and dispute and to defend the dignity of the law, use of legal Archaisms, use of Loan words, use of Synonyms or Near-synonyms are natural. But Pronouns, Adjectives and Adverbs are rarely used unless there is no possibility of confusion.
1. 1 Use of Legal Archaisms
Archaisms are the words that reflect the usage of an earlier period, in other words, old-fashioned words or phrases. Archaisms occur when a style is modeled on older works，so as to revive earlier practices or achieve a desired effect. It is well known that many of legal English vocabulary are derived from Anglo-Saxon, Latin, or Law French. It is the main reason that makes legal English difficult to get the public across. In spite of this, the legal professionals still use legal archaisms to keep legal English more precise and less ambiguous. Archaisms are the old words that are not used now except for special purposes. Archaisms, outmoded words and expressions that seem not yet obsolete, abound in legal English. They are quite different from Modern English in pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar, etc. Therefore, it is just like another language difficult to understand. Qin Xiubai (1986) claims in A Survey Stylistics that we no longer use archaisms in spoken English. However, in religious English, and literature as poetry, newspaper and so on, archaisms are used sometimes. While in legal English, they are widely used to reflect the solemn, conservative, precision and authoritative style of legal documents. As Crystal and Davy (1969: 207) write, “It is especially noticeable that any passage of legal English is usually well studded with archaic words and phrases of a kind that could be used by no one also but lawyers [4].” So one of the most remarkable characteristics of legal English is the use of legal archaisms. These words and phrases sometimes can reach precision by clear reference to the words previously mentioned in the document. The most frequently used archaisms are formed by “here- , “there- , “where- , such as “hereafter”, “hereby”, “hereof”, “therein”, “thereabout”, “thereby”, “thereupon”, “therewith”, “whereby”, “whereof”, “wherefore”, “wherein”, etc. Here are two examples:转贴于 酷文网-论文下载中心 http://www.coolwen.net