A Study Of Vagueness In Legal Documents Concerning Intellectual Property

Vagueness is an intrinsic characteristic of language, and it also occurs in the language of legal documents. Although the pursuit of precision and clearness is still the task of the language of the law, it is impossible to eliminate vagueness totally in legal documents. With more and more attention paid to intellectual property and intellectual-property-related cases in today's society both home and abroad, the linguistic study of legal documents concerning intellectual property becomes an emerging field. As previous studies on vagueness in the language of the law rarely touch upon the special domain, this thesis tries to fill in the gap.The thesis first proposes a new classification of vagueness from the semantic perspective, which avoids the weakness of classifications in the past and serves well for the present study. Then, it discusses and analyzes the phenomenon of vagueness in legal documents concerning intellectual property with seven major laws and conventions as its data. Based on close investigation, it finds that different categories of vagueness do exist in legal documents concerning intellectual property, and there are motivations or reasonable causes for the occurrences of vagueness in this kind of legal document. Vagueness actually serves as a lubricant for the compromise between the stability of the law and the changes of time and situation.This study on vagueness in legal documents concerning intellectual property can be held as a reference for the settlement of disputes in intellectual-property-related cases.