Linguistic Pecularities Of Contracts in English

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 stylistic structure, the whole document is one sentence. It looks like separate, shaped clauses often divided by commas or semicolons, and not by full stops, often numbered. Every predicate construction begins with a capital letter in the form of a participial or an infinitive construction.

e.g. 3. Claims