Amy Wang
Lancaster University

When precision meets vagueness:a corpus-assisted approach to vagueness in Taiwanese and British courtrooms

Vagueness in language often carries negative connotations,and this is particularly the case in legal contexts.

Yet vagueness is a natural part of language (e.g.Channell, 1994,Williamson,1994).It conveys various functions in language use; for example,i t enables speakers to flag their utterance as uncertain, and to compensate for a lack of more precise information.Precision and imprecision in legal language has already attracted the attention of scholars (e.g. Solan, 1993), but has tended to focus on written legal texts. This paper examines vagueness in (i) spoken contexts, namely courtroom discourse and (ii) two different cultural settings (British and Taiwanese). It explores the interaction of some opposing tendencies in courtroom exchanges:how the expectation in high precision of court language interacts with the natural phenomenon of language vagueness, and how high-precision legalese interacts with the language used by lay people (e.g. plaintiffs, defendants and witnesses). Drawing upon corpora consisting of transcriptions of Taiwanese and British criminal court proceedings, the paper compares the patterns of linguistic vagueness between these two legal systems, of which the former belongs to the continental law system and the latter an adversarial system. It will be demonstrated that some vagueness patterns and functions are common to both the British and Taiwanese legal settings (e.g. self-protection, modifying the illocutionary force and marking speaker’s subjective assumption), but they are realized in markedly different ways in each. Finally,it will also be shown that manipulation of vagueness in court is closely connected to participants’goals in the context.