普通法的普通用法：法律詞匯於法律文本和一般文本的語義差別比較

When Laws Get Common: Comparing the Use of Legal Terms in Two Corpora

英語在過去曾是香港法律體系中唯一的官方語文，直至香港回歸，漢語成為另一官方語文，才有「雙語法律」的實行和應用。然而由於大部分法律概念及詞匯源起英文（甚至拉丁文），直接翻譯成中文未必就能精確地、毫無歧義地表達原有的法律理念。這種差異不僅是漢語詞匯語義學中一個重要而有趣的課題，對香港如何落實雙語法律亦是一項挑戰。我們選取了一系列語義相關而又容易混淆的中文法律詞匯，並比較它們在不同範疇中的用法（包括法律語料及一般語料），從而探討中文法律詞匯的多義性，與有關法律意義在兩種文本中的差別。語料分析結果顯示中文法律詞匯的多義性比英文繁複，且在一般語料中用得比較含混。本文亦討論到以英文翻譯的差異以及詞典中定義來判別中文法律詞匯的義項。我們下一步將研究以自動方式建立一個「詞網」式的法律詞匯詞庫，以及把比較範圍擴展至香港地區以外的語料。

For more than a century, English was the only official language for Hong Kong’s legal system. Only very recently has Chinese been granted equal status. While legal concepts can often be unambiguously expressed in English, their expression in Chinese has not yet reached the same level of precision. This discrepancy raises interesting questions in Chinese lexical semantics and new challenges in the practice of law in Hong Kong. In this study, we compare the use of a set of semantically related and easily confused Chinese legal terms in two corpora, one of legal domain and the other of general domain, to see how polysemous these words are and if the legal senses of these words in the former are preserved in the latter. Our analysis has shown that Chinese legal words are quite polysemous compared to their English counterparts, and are used with considerable fuzziness in general texts. We also discuss the sense distinction of these legal words with respect to their English translation differences as well as dictionary definitions. In the future we will explore the automatic construction of some WordNet-like lexical resource for legal terminology and extend our analysis to cover legal-word uses in Chinese communities outside Hong Kong.