Linguistic ambiguity and vagueness in Russian legal texts

Abstract

In Russian legal texts there are many various language-based phenomena identified by lawyers as “cases of indeterminacy.” Looking at these phenomena from a linguistic point of view allows one to offer their meaningful classification. This article presents such a classification. It is based on the traditional distinction between ambiguity (we discuss only lexical, structural, and referential ambiguity) and vagueness, namely: vagueness in the narrow sense, fuzziness (we distinguish between referential fuzziness, classificatory fuzziness, and lexical fuzzy expressions including hedges, fuzzy quantifiers etc.), and lack of specification. In addition to the classification itself, the article provides some semantic tests and a variety of examples that illustrate the different types of ambiguity and vagueness, including those from Russian legal texts. We particularly argue that the cases of syntactic and referential ambiguity are periodically encountered in Russian language of law. Among them, for example, the cases of coordination ambiguity, the cases of relative clause attachment ambiguity and others. At the same time, the found examples of vagueness are expectedly much more numerous. The article aims to provide lawyers with tools for the systematic search and analysis of cases of linguistic ambiguity and vagueness in Russian texts.