On the Stylistic Features of Legal English

Abstract

At present, most of places are ruled by law, and legal affairs in these places are more and more internationalized. In addition, English is the international language, which is the most popular. Therefore, it is important and necessary for us to have a discussion on the stylistic features of legal English in order to help relevant practitioners and scholars to deal with legal texts in English. Legal English has its own stylistic feature on different levels including graphological level, lexical level, and syntactic level. On graphological level, legal English takes on the features including the same capitalization, the same font style, the same font size, etc. in the same kind of legal documents; on lexical level, it takes on some features including archaisms, loan words from Latin and French, technical terms; on syntactic level it takes on some features including declarative sentences, long and complex sentences, complete sentences. Although all of stylistic features are not dealt with, these main features are important for relevant persons to deal with legal texts.