【正文】 e of disputes 46 How to make use of vague expressions in law English so as to win disputes 47Chapter Six Conclusion 54內(nèi)容提要自中國于2001年加入世界貿(mào)易組織后，中國的卷入的貿(mào)易爭端日益增多，特別是反傾銷案。那么，中國能采取什么行動為自己的利益而斗爭呢？本人認為，利用國際法規(guī)中的模糊語言，給相關(guān)模糊詞一個有利的定義，是幫助我方在爭端解決中占得上風(fēng)的一條途徑。本文共有六章。第二章，在介紹了研究模糊語言的幾種不同途徑后，我提出自己的理解。本章還分析了模糊語言形成的各種原因。第四章，我分析了法律語言準(zhǔn)確性的另一體現(xiàn)，即模糊語言。第五章討論了如何利用法律文件中模糊語言保障我國利益。在該案中，巴西通過對一個模糊詞提出一個有利而又令人信服的含義理解而勝過西班牙。第六章是整篇文章的總結(jié)。Chapter One Introduction“Is he is he a tall man?” “Who shall answer that question?” cried Emma. “My father would say ‘yes’。 and Miss Bates and I, he is just the happy medium.” The above dialogue is extracted from Emma written by Jane Austen. While language is considered to be municating means people use every day, we can hardly ignore the fact that many of our utterances are relatively vague. Let’s consider, for example, the word ‘tall’. There is no precise, known height that defines the line between a person who is tall and a person who is not. Why do we use a language in which such words are so prevalent? Why don’t we simply adopt as a definition that ‘tall’ will mean above, say, 6foot2? We could even adopt a contextspecific definition, saying for example that ‘tall’ for a newborn means above 15 inches, while ‘tall’ for a professional basketball player means above 6foot10.If any word we use had to be given such a specific definition, there would be a great efficiency loss in munication. And it is obviously easier to municate when one is allowed to use vague language. Most speakers of English are not particularly aware of the frequent use of vague language (unless it is pointed out to them) and this fact is in itself of interest. It shows that vagueness in munication is part of our takenforgranted world, and that normally we do not notice it unless it appears inappropriate – for example, when someone seems to be deliberately withholding information. This makes vagueness like many other linguistic phenomena, which pass unnoticed until an investigating linguist argues that they are worthy of description. An example is metaphor, which appeared to be an esoteric issue until the publication of Metaphors We Live By (Lakoff and Johnson 1980). In that book, the authors point out that speakers often do not realize that the language they are using is metaphorical. Likewise, experts found out that people often do not realize that the language they are using is vague.There are many different standards regarding the use of language. Clarity and precision maybe are the most important. Hence, people generally believe that vagueness should be avoided. I would like to say that this is rather too simple a view, and likely to be positively misleading as an instruction to those who are learning how to write. Many good writers demonstrate their petence through their use of a certain degree of vagueness that is right for the purpose of their writing. This is the key to understanding that vagueness in language is neither all ‘bad’ nor all ‘good’. What matters is that vague language must be used appropriately.In legal system, the use of language is crucial because that lawmakers use language to make laws, and courts use language to state their grounds for conferral. Legal language is concerned with the imposition of obligations and conferring of rights. In terms of mode, legal language is mainly recorded in a written form being essentially a visual language meant to be scrutinized. Though, for instance, court trial is conducted in spoken form, the language used at court shares much with the characteristics of written legal documents.In this thesis, I confine myself to the language used in written legal documents. In order to ensure that a document says exactly what it is meant to say, and leaves no chance for misinterpretation, posers of the document will take the greatest pains to make it municate just one set of meanings and avoid any possible ambiguity. But we cannot deny that, owing to some reasons, we need to use vague language in legal documents so as to achieve what we mean to have. It may seem inconsistent that vague language can also serve the purpose of preciseness in legal documents. As a matter of fact, appropriate use of vague language is important to legal documentation and thus deserves more analysis than it has so far received, especially when China now is a member of World Trade Organization (WTO), which provides China with a lot of opportunities of getting involved in international lawmaking.Awareness of vague expressions appearing in English legal documents will prepare us for disputes arising from international trade, and will grant us the chances of taking advantage of international laws so as to safeguard our national interests. However, the investigation of the vagueness of legal language is quite limited, though we have many scholars who study vague linguistics or legal linguistics. In this thesis, I try to carry out a tentative research concerning vagueness in law English. Ullmann’s idea that it is language itself that leads to vagueness seems reasonable, but I think he confuses cause and effects. It is the world and people in it that are reflected by, and even necessitate the capacity of language to express vagueness. So, linguistic vagueness is not gratuitous – it is caused, like many other observed characteristics of language, by the world in which language is used. Peirce is often considered as the originator of the notion of vagueness in language, although Ullmann brings it forward rather earlier. Peirce was perhaps the first to try to formulate the notion in a rigorous way, as follows: A proposition is vague where there are possible states of things concerning which it is intrinsically uncertain whether, had they been contemplated by the speaker, he would have regarded as excluded or allowed by the proposition. By intrinsically uncertain we mean