The Pragmatics of Legal Vagueness in Courtroom Discourse

The study aims at investigating pragmatic vagueness in the Case of the 49ers-employment Dispute in Hong Kong (Hong Kong 49er) courtroom. Specifically, it seeks to: identify the forms of pragmatic vagueness in terms of a. accuracy-oriented hedge, b. affection-oriented hedge, c. discourse coherence-oriented hedge, analyze pragmatic vagueness in terms of the following functions; a. referential function, b. phatic function , c. expressive function, d. metalingual function, e. facilitator function , f. generality function and propose a procedure for courtroom discourse analysis of pragmatic vagueness.