Linguistic Pecularities Of Contracts in English

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Claims can be lodged during a certain period of time, which is usually fixed in a contract. During the claim period the Seller is to enquire into the case and communicate his reply. He either meets the claim or declines it. If a claim has a legitimate ground behind it the parties try to settle it amicably. The Seller in turn is entitled to make a claim on his counterpart if the Buyer fails to meet his contractual obligations. The Seller may inflict penalties on the Buyer if there is a default in payment. Financially, legitimate claims are in large part settled by debit or credit notes [10, P. 12 – 28].

Types of contracts. Abbreviations

In order to speed up the preparation of contract documents and to minimise possibility of errors in them, a unified standardised form of contract documents, the Master Pattern for Contract Documents, has been developed. It establishes principles and regulations for the construction of standardised forms of documents used in foreign trade, like Supplement to contract, Order and Order confirmation.

Supplement to contract is a business document which is an integral part of the contract, containing amendments or additions to the previously agreed contract conditions. The supplement should also be agreed on and signed by both the exporter and the importer.

Order is a business document presenting the importer’s offer for dealing which contains specific conditions of a future transaction.

Order Confirmation is a business document presenting the exporter’s message containing unclaused acceptance of the order conditions. The Master pattern has also been accepted as a basis for standardised forms of enquiries and offers, used at pre-contract stages of dealing [5, P.131 – 132].

Different firms and organisations trading regularly, work out standardised forms of contracts for typical deals. Such standardised contracts are printed and include typical rights and duties of the contracting sides in selling and buying some goods and services. There are special columns for the names of the Buyer and Seller, names of goods, their quantity, prices and delivery terms. In case of declining or adding some terms, people use supplementary columns in a contract form.

Standardised forms of export and import deals differ greatly and it makes them two general types of contracts [13, P.146]. Thus, there are export and import contracts. They reflect different positions of buyers and sellers in trading. Contracts in import trade are called orders, and their submission warrancy, and delivery terms, as well as sanctions are much harder towards the sellers than those ones in export trade. Standardised forms of import contracts are sent to potential buyers before getting commercial proposals and, actually, before striking a deal. The languages of contracts are agreed upon on the both sides. It goes without saying that information and style are kept the same not depending on the language of contract.

As textual varieties, contracts are divided into administrative-managerial, financial-economical, advertising, scientific-technical, and artistic-publicational contracts*. Functional spheres of their circulation can be easily guessed from names of contract types in this classification, and are the subject of economic, rather than linguistic, study.

Contracts may be differentiated by the subject of a deal. There are export contracts for the sale of oil products, machinery tools, grain, timber, the supply of goods, etc. Orders in import trade deal with ordering and purchasing goods. They are often supported with requests, remindings, verifications of different terms, guarantee and waving inspection letters, and many others.

Реферат опубликован: 28/01/2009