A Critical Discourse Analysis Of English Employment Contract Texts

With the rapid development of the society and the accelerated frequency of interaction between different economic entities, signing an employment contract between the employer and the employee has become increasingly important in different walks of life. However, various types of disputes between the employer and the employee concerning the employment contract texts have been causing great economic loss. A general survey of all these economic cases leads to the noticeable phenomenon that the employee tends to play the role of loser rather than the employer in all the economic disputes. Employment contract texts are bound to reflect and consolidate certain ideologies and power relations between the employer and the employee. The exemption of all those accidental and complicated reason puts the discourse of the employment contract texts itself as the fundamental cause of almost all economic disputes between the two sides. There must be a power inequality and ideology domination which is hidden and served for the employer's side in the discourse itself. Although the studies of CDA have been conducted in numerous fields in connection with various types of discourses, in which employment contract texts, as an important discourse closely related to social groups' fundamental interests, has seldom attracted the research attention.Based on the theories of critical linguistics and previous studies of the relationship among language, ideology and power, this paper intends to discover the features of employment contract texts and thus unveil the power inequality and ideology domination which are performed by the linguistic forms and grammatical structures in the employment contract texts.This paper intends to uncover and summarize the most prominent linguistic features of the employment contract texts from the following aspects:the features of graphology in ECT, the lexical features which are manifested by the choice of words in the texts, the semantic traits under the specific contexts of employment contracts, and the syntactic characters of the clauses in the employment contracts. In order to discover all the features of employment contracts,50 sample contract texts concerning specific working fields are collected and gathered. The main source of all these sample contract texts is from the internet. For the discussion and analysis lies in the language itself, so the preceding work to eliminate those unrelated items, while leaving the clauses that define and confine the responsibilities and rights of the employer and the employee. Then the study concerning lexicography, semantics and syntactics is conducted respectively.The findings of this paper are to help the employee to raise consciousness of this unveiled nature of unequal phenomenon. However, the eradiation of this phenomenon and the realization of change depend on people developing a critical consciousness of power inequality and ideology domination, thus to arouse the general awareness among both the employer and the employee of exploitive power relations between both sides, and to make an alteration of this unreasonable and unequal phenomenon in order to ensure both sides' economic interests and create a healthier atmosphere for economic life.