| Vagueness is one major linguistic concept in discourse analysis and linguistic studies,and unlike other linguistic concepts,vagueness is abstract and obscure,which is less definable and classifiable.Vagueness is a ubiquitous linguistic phenomenon,and it is found and used intentionally or unintentionally in many language varieties in terms of linguistic characteristics,which serves different functions.In light of the significance of vagueness,a detailed and comprehensive study of vagueness is obviously meaningful.Language in legislation or legislative language is different from other language varieties.For example,it’s different from literature language,computer language,media language,etc.Since legislative language is characterized with its unique language features of accuracy,brevity,so on and so forth.Moreover,it is very important to point out that legislative language is influenced by different political systems and legal systems.The political system and legal system of the People’s Republic of China are different from those of any other country in the world,which makes many features of Chinese legislative language definitely different from those of other countries.Vagueness in legislative language is intriguing,and it can be defined that the semantic meaning of some linguistic components in legislative language is open,and the semantic boundaries of these linguistic components are blurred.Vague components can be classified into vague adjectives,vague adverbs,vague nouns and vague verbs,which can be interpreted through different perspectives.The thesis is a corpus-based study of vagueness in Chinese legislation,which focuses on a statistical and quantitative analysis of language vagueness in a big corpus which is compiled of as many as 96 Chinese legislative instruments with about 1,200,400 Chinese characters.The layout of the thesis is supported and illustrated by data,which makes it objective and convincing.According to the division of the system of laws of the People’s Republic of China,the socialist system of laws with Chinese characteristics is roughly composed of seven legal branches.Consequently,the big corpus is divided into seven sub-corpora accordingly.Every sub-corpus is processed by Wmatrix and Antconc afterwards,which are two of the most known and accepted language analysis tools.Wmatrix has multiple functions like semantic tagging,part-of-speech tagging,and it can also produce frequency lists.Corpus theories are applied to compile corpus,process corpus and analyze corpus.When the seven sub-corpora are tagged by the USAS tagging tool of Wmatrix,vague components will be tagged with specific taggers,which makes the classification of the vague components possible.Then all of the vague components are classified into vague adjectives,vague adverbs,vague nouns and vague verbs,and they are extracted from the seven sub-corpora to demonstrate number of hits and percentage,then the data are further processed by SPSS and Log-likelihood Ratio Calculator for significance difference.Meanwhile,based on the examples from the seven sub-corpora and jurisprudential theories,implications of functions and negative influences of vagueness in Chinese legislation are analyzed.Ultimately,this study reaches six findings,in every sub-corpus,among vague adjectives,vague adverbs,vague verbs and vague nouns,vague nouns have the highest usage percentage;most vague components belong to general and abstract terms;within the seven sub-corpora,the sub-corpus of related laws of the Constitution has the largest usage percentage of vague components;in every sub-corpus,vague adverbs occupies the smallest percentage in general;there is no obvious significance difference of the frequencies of vague components within every sub-corpus;there is obvious significance difference of the frequencies of vague components across the seven sub-corpora.Implications show that vagueness in Chinese legislation serve such functions as generalization function,performance-guiding function,maintaining the flexibility of laws. |
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