Linguistic Pecularities Of Contracts in English

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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:

to point out main features of formal English as the language of business correspondence;

to describe the structure of contract and to single out its main clauses which are characteristic of this type of documents;

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

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.

Реферат опубликован: 28/01/2009