Linguistic Pecularities Of Contracts in English
Contents
Introduction
4
Chapter 1. Contracts. General characteristics and types
7
1. English of documents’ writing
7
2. Theoretical problems of the language of documents
13
3. The structure of contract and its essential clauses
15
4. Types of contracts. Abbreviation
19
Chapter 2. Linguistic peculiarities of contract
23
2.1. Contract as a type of text and its stylistic characteristics
23
2.2. Grammatical peculiarities of contract
26
2.3. Lexical peculiarities of contract
32
Conclusion
38
References
42
Introduction
The interest to the problem of drawing up contracts is not
occasional. Nowadays more and more people are getting involved in the
world of business relationships. As a result of it, business people
need specialists possessing knowledge of the English language used for
writing documents.
Any serious deal should be struck with the help of contracts and
agreements. A written form of agreements is a guarantee that different
people, for example Buyers and Sellers, will cooperate in accordance
with a certain business strategy, and their interests will be taken
into consideration by their partners.
A contract makes clear such things as quantity and quality of
goods, their prices, delivery terms, order of payment, and other
terms. Contract serves to make a business operation smooth and logic.
It also proves seriousness of contracting parties and defines their
responsibilities before each other. An honest word of a businessman,
as well, should be reflected in a contract of a different kind. It is
called intentions agreement and is a manifestation of a wish to do
business. That is, every step and stage of a business deal should be
supported in a legal way, in an official form.
The chosen problem has appeared to be very urgent, because
linguistics lacks its precise description. There is a clear-cut
between formal and informal styles of English, but there is no strict
difference between spoken and written business English. Obviously,
businessmen do not communicate with their companions using intricate
phrases and bookish words. Still, they are obliged to use some formal
clichйs which may sound strange to non-business people, but are
essential for conducting business. Anyway, in the research we have
been trying to investigate the written part of business procedure, and
to analyse texts of contracts considering their specific
peculiarities.
Another thing to be mentioned is that there are very few scientific
researches devoted to the problem of drawing up business documents. As
a result of it, theory of writing business papers, on the one hand,
reflects highly subjective approaches. On the other hand, such
approaches are not unified in accordance with existing rules of formal
English which is also greatly influenced by informal English. Such
influence really exists, but there are no accepted criteria about what
changes should be taken into consideration. That is why people who
draw up contracts suffer quite understandable problems: How should
they do it to sound correct in the foreign language? To what degree
should they be formal in the text of contract, if even English-
speaking people meet difficulties of a special kind in drawing a line
between formal and informal English? However, these problems are side
problems of making up contracts here.
The object of the research, thus, is a contract as a part of a
business deal and a type of written business English. Its subject
comprises investigation of linguistic peculiarities of a contract
which make technique of its writing obligatory for people involved in
drawing up business documents.
The purpose of the research is to investigate peculiarities in
texts of contracts. It is performed through comprehension,
interpretation and analysis of contractual essential clauses, all of
them illustrated by examples from texts of contracts.
The solution of the aim claims for doing away with a number of
certain tasks, such as:
1. to point out main features of formal English as the language of
business correspondence;
2. to describe the structure of contract and to single out its main
clauses which are characteristic of this type of documents;
3. to expose peculiarities of contract dividing them into three
general groups of stylistic, grammatical and lexical peculiarities.
In order to solve these tasks the author of the research has used
methods of studying and analysis of theoretical literature and
practical manuals on the problem; the methods of observation,
description, means of syntactic and semantic analyses.
The research has been performed in four interrelated steps.
Analysis of literature on the problem has logically been the first
stage. After it, theoretical basis of the research has been compiled.
Then the author has picked up examples illustrating grammatical,
lexical and stylistic peculiarities of contracts. At last,
generalisation of results of the research and drawing up final
conclusions have been performed.
In fact, linguistic peculiarities of contracts in comparison with
their structure and functioning in the business world have not been
investigated thoroughly enough yet. There are either economic papers
on forms and types of contracts, or linguistic researches on stylistic
peculiarities of formal English. To state a connection between those
kinds of data and make links between them describing texts of
contracts and to analyse their distinguishing features are the main
factors of scientific novelty of the research.
The practical significance of the research is in possible
application of its results in practice by people who are interested in
drawing up contracts and in the way of doing it correctly. It can be
also be of an interest for people studying problems of style in
English and functional usage of formal and informal styles. The
results of the research can be taken into consideration by students
and instructors of English and English stylistics. As well they can be
used as material for special courses on business English for students
of linguistic and economic departments.
The examples for analysis have been selected by the method of
overwhelming excerption from texts of contracts dated different years.
This fact can be a basis for comparison of linguistic devices used in
them. In order to make analysis of examples more precise, the author
has used data not only of linguistic, but those ones of economic
dictionaries as well.
The structure of the research includes introduction, two chapters,
seven paragraphs, conclusion and references. The total volume of the
research is 43 pages.
Chapter 1. Contracts. Their general characteristics and types
1. English of documents’ writing
A document in its any appearance has always been an important part
of business doing. Business contracts are impossible without
correspondence all over the world. It does not matter, whether you
communicate with your partner on the phone (orally) or through telexes
(in writing). All decisions and terms must be confirmed by documents.
All business papers, both correspondence (letters), telexes,
enquiries, offers, claims (complaints) and contracts (agreements) are
normally associated with striking business deals and their procedure.
Such documents are made up and signed “by a judicious authority and
are of legal importance” [5, P.7]. As a result of it, business
documents are written in accordance with some officially accepted
forms, common for everybody who wants to do business.
The official business language is sometimes called officialese and
differs from other kinds of the English language, mostly because of
specific character of its functional usage, which can be illustrated
in classical terms of style, its predestination, and main features.
A functional style of a language is characterised by the greater or
less typification of its constituents and supra-phrasal units, in
which the choice and arrangement of interdependent linguistic means
are calculated to secure the purpose of communication [3, P.312].
The style of official documents is divided into sub-styles of the
language of business documents, legal documents, diplomacy, and
military documents. The aim of the style of official documents is to
state conditions binding two parties in an undertaking and to reach
agreement between them.
General features of the style of English of documents’ writing are
the following:
1) conventionality of expression;
2) absence of emotiveness;
3) encoded character of the language system (including
abbreviations);
4) general syntactical mode of combining several pronouncements
into one sentence [3, P.316].
The syntactical pattern of business correspondence style is made up
from compositional patterns of variants of this style which have their
own designs. The form of a document itself is informative, because it
tells something about the matter dealt with. From the viewpoint of its
Страницы: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
