On The Classification Of Hedges And Their Use In General Agreement On Trade In Services

Since the theory of fuzzy sets was presented by L.A. Zadeh in his article Fuzzy Sets which was published in 1965, this theory has brought a new point of view to linguistic research. Fuzzy linguistics is a kind of study which uses the fuzzy sets theory to analyze fuzzy languages. Fuzziness is one of the noticeable features that distinguish natural language from artificial language. So is legal language. Legal language is actually a variable of language, it is the language used by law practitioners and jurists of common law system in the countries whose official language is English (Melinkoff,1963). Because of the special use of legal English, one of its aims is that it should be used as precise as possible. But in reality, fuzziness existed everywhere in language. It is impossible to make legal English absolutely precise. There are many hedges in language which make it not so clear and definite. Hedge is a word or phrase whose job is to make things fuzzier or less fuzzy. This definition was given by Lakeoff in 1972. Hedges are very common in legal English and play an import role in it. This paper attempts to explore the use of hedges in legal English in order to make good use of them in legal practice.This paper consists of six parts. The first part is a brief introduction to fuzzy set theory, fuzzy linguistics. In recent years, great success has been achieved in domestic study of fuzzy linguistics since 1979; however, much of research is restricted to the fuzzy semantics and lacks of the study in fuzzy language application, such as in legal English, including hedges. So the second part is about hedges, including the definition and classifications of hedges. The author looks back on the prior study on the classifications of English hedges. The third part is about legal language and legal English and it focuses on the fuzziness of legal English, including the phenomenon of fuzziness in legal English. In this part, the General Agreement on Trade in Services, as the corpus of this thesis's study is introduce briefly. The fourth part introduces the reasons for vagueness in legal English. The fifth part is a quantitative analysis of English hedges in the General Agreement on Trade in Services. GATS is selected as corpus, one reason is that this legal document is easy to get; the other reason is that the author doesn't want to make the study too complicated. The author tries to explore the reasons and functions of hedges in the GATS. In the last part, the author tries to point out the implications of the study from two aspects:implication for legal English teaching and implication for draftsmen and legal practice. At the end, the author indicates the limitations of the study and presents some suggestions for further study.