The Stylistic Features Of Contract English

A contract refers to an agreement establishing, modifying and terminating the civil rights and obligations between subjects of equal footing. The language for contract is different from that for basic English or literature. In the Five Clocks, the American linguist Martin Joos advances the five stylistic varieties in English: the Frozen Style, the Formal Style, the Consultative Style, the Casual Style and the Intimate Style. The style of Contract English can be considered as the first one, which is the Frozen Style because the language habits of the profession cause lawyers (conn-act drafters) to frequently choose one means of expression over other possibilities. The special expressions used in English contract are difficult for non-professionals to understand. In order to understand them, non-professionals need a process of interpretation by professionals. This process is the process of thawing or unfreezing.With China's carrying out the policy to promote reform and opening to the outside world and China's entry the WTO, there are more and more opportunities for us to communicate with those countries whose official language is English. When communicating with natural persons, legal persons or other organizations from the English speaking countries, we often need to sign English contracts with them. English contracts are becoming more and more important in our daily life. But the study of the stylistic features of contract English is limited. In our country and abroad, there are few books or articles talking about the language of contract. The language of contract is quite often ignored. There are a number of worthwhile guides to forensic linguistics in general, but given their broad scope they are of little help to the English contract learners. In order to improve the relevant study, I choose The Stylistic Features of Contract English as the title of the dissertation. Such a dissertation like mine could have a significantly greater impact on contractEnglish study than any number of works on stylistic features of legal English.In this dissertation I examine the conventions of language used in English contracts in a more systematic way and a lot of examples are cited to support what I want to say.After briefly introducing the definition and classification of contract, the dissertation defines the terms style and contract English and points out that contract in this dissertation refers to the written clause-style civil or commercial contract of the countries whose official language is English. Generally speaking, contract English is an important branch of legal English, which is the language of the contract of England, America, and some other countries whose official language is English. The word "style" may refer to some or all of the language habits shared by a group of people (contract drafters or lawyers) at one time, or over a period oftime.The most important part of this dissertation is Part five: the stylistic features of contract English. First of all the features of lexicon in contract are introduced. This dissertation, based on the analysis of typical examples, discusses the lexical features of contract English from the perspectives of formal words, archaisms, technical terms, common words with uncommon meanings, reduplication of words, deliberate use of vague words, and avoidance of pronouns etc..After the interpretation of the lexical features of contract English, the 7 syntactic features are analyzed one by one: the use of declarative sentence, long and complex sentence, frequent use of model verb, shall, unusual sentence structure, nominalization, simple present tense, appropriate use of the active voice and the passive voice etc..This dissertation also lists other features of legal usage in contract; words-and-numerals approach used to convey numbers, impersonal constructions and the capitalization of some nouns in contract.The implications of stylistic features of contract English are interpreted in part 6 of this dissertation. To know the stylistic features of contra...