Qualitative And Quantitative Analyses Of Legal Style

In the study of legal style, most of linguists and lawmen qualitatively analyze the legal style in terms of linguistic markers, i.e. describe and interpret the legal style. Few related scholars substantiate the frequent employment of these markers.In the study of my thesis, the author just uses a qualitative analysis to substantiate it, during which the author will traditionally study stylistic markers of lexicology, syntax, text and rhetoric of legal documents, and further, will creatively conduct a quantitative analysis to compare the fullness of legal style of different kinds of legal documents. Especially, as to the second analysis, in advance, the author makes a hypothetic proposition that the fullness of legal style will change along with the change of legal function of legal documents.In the next Chapter, the author firstly classifies all the documents into three kinds: discourse writing, litigation-related writing and normative writing; secondly selects some documents respectively from the three kinds; thirdly obtains the stylistic value in terms of weight average of all stylistic markers in each documents; fourthly gets the value of the fullness through weight average of all stylistic value in each kind; last compares the values of the fullness of three kinds and find out that the result coincides with the author's hypothetic proposition. In other words, the formal nature of the legal style is not absolutely rigid as people traditionally regard, but a field from the formal to the less-formal. In addition, the method of quantitative analysis can also be applied to legal translation for evaluating the stylistic equivalence. Of course, the former is the main focus of the thesis.