Communicative significance of vague language: A diachronic corpus-based study of legislative texts

Abstract

This article investigates the role of vague language in legislative texts from a diachronic perspective. It analyses the English part of the JRC-Acquis, a 56 million word corpus of legislative documents from the year 1958–2006. The results demonstrate that there is a highly frequent usage of vague language in such texts, but different types of vague language reflect different diachronic usages. The vague use associated with the semantic group ‘degree’ experiences a significant increase over the years, whilst the vague use in relation to ‘category’ has dramatically fallen. Factors such as the linguistic features of those vague items and the communicative purposes of legislative texts may account for such developments. The results also reveal that legislative texts over time tend to involve the use of more ‘informal’ and conceptually ‘simple’ lexical features so that such texts may become more accessible to their audiences. These findings may provide useful insights for the future drafting of legislative documents, especially concerning how a strategic use of vague language could contribute to the discourse functions of such texts.