Marrying the general with the specific: lexical ambiguity in prenuptial agreements

The dilemma between clarity and ambiguity is of utmost significance in the specific domain of legal discourse as many authors have underlined(Tiersma 1999; Gotti 2005; Williams 2005; Bhatia et al. 2005). A legal text has to be maximally determinate and precise, so that the meanings of all the words are as clear as possible. On the other hand, the text has to cover every relevant situation, […] it has to be all-inclusive (Bhatia et al. 2005, 10). Various linguistic strategies can be employed to be deliberately imprecise or voluntarily exact and accurate. This study aims at investigating the “tension between flexibility and precision" (Tiersma, 1999, 81) in American prenuptial agreements and the way in which the employment of peculiar lexical features can enhance ambiguity on one side, and boost referential specificity on the other. Focusing on adjectives and multinomials in prenups, it will argue that if, on the one hand, some kinds of adjectives seem to confer ambiguity and vagueness, on the other hand, multinomials contribute to making texts more precise and clearer in many respects.