A Study On Local Grammars Of Responsibility Expressions In Chinese Economic Contracts

Business Chinese teaching has always been a hot topic in Chinese for specific purposes.Contract text is a written contract regulating and restricting business activities,which is a typical restricted language in business domain."Responsibility"is one of the important functions of the contract text.The detailed analysis and comparison of the standard contract language phenomenon is helpful to enrich and deepen the teaching and research of Chinese for specific purposes in specific fields.In this study,a thematic corpus of 312 contract texts totaling 610,000 words was constructed by selecting the leasing contract and the sale contract as the subject matter of the house.Combined with Swales(1981)'s step analysis,Sinclair(2004)''s extended meaning unit and local grammar analysis method,this paper aims to investigate the distribution of the expression of "responsibility" in the contract text,the specific language types and the differences in different types of texts.Specifically,the following three questions are experted to be answered.(1)Which parts of the contract text are the expression of "responsibility" mainly distributed in?(2)What are the main language patterns used for the expression of "responsibility"?(3)What are the similarities and differences between lease contract and sale contract in the local grammar of”responsibility" expression?The findings are as follows:(1)according to the requirements of contract laws and regulations and the analysis of corpus text,there are 9 steps in lease contract and 13 steps in sale contract.The two types of contract phrases are missing and mixed in different degrees.The expression "responsibility" is unevenly distributed in each language of the two types of contract.(2)There are altogether 8 language markers related to the expression of "responsibility",including the content verb "to be responsible,to bear,to undertake",the modal verb "should,must,need,shall not",the phrase "V...Responsibility ",conveying different semantic prosody.From the point of view of responsibility language markers,there are 29 local grammatical patterns in lease contract and 27 in sale contract.The two types of contract have the same functional categories of "responsibility" expression,with a total number of 12.The functional categories can be reduced according to the actual responsibility expression.There are four types of responsibility in the contract text,including payment of expenses,management of subject matter and property rights,remedial consequences and event application.(3)The two types of partial grammatical forms of contract have the same functional category and responsibility type,but there are differences in the use of responsibility mark and partial grammatical form.The 33 local grammatical patterns of "responsibility" can be used to discover the expression of "responsibility"in similar purchase and sales contracts.Based on Firth's(1957)restricted language and Harris(1968)sub-language thought,this study was conducted from the micro level of business contract in the field of "responsibility" expression on local grammar analysis to describe function research.It is helpful for the study of the corresponding relationship between language form.In addition,the analysis process is also applicable to data driven business Chinese learning.