A Corpus-based Stylistic Study Of Maritime Business Contracts

Nowadays, about 70 percent of international trade is transported by the mode of maritime transportation. Therefore, maritime transportation is an important mean of the development of international trade. At present, China has become a major power in maritime transportation, and is moving forward to be a worldwide leading power in this field. In this process, the formation and performance of maritime business contracts has become a basic and indispensable condition. As is to known all, English is the universal language in concluding a contract. Therefore, the study of maritime business contracts should not only focus on legal research, but also from the angel of English linguistics.With a view to explore the stylistic features of maritime business contracts, based on previous academic researches, this thesis focuses on studying the language used in maritime business contracts. Adopting the modern stylistics theories as its theoretical basis, and corpus linguistics as supportive knowledge, this study makes analysis on lexical level, syntactical level and textual level with a method of the combination of the quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis. The main research subject is Maritime Business Contracts corpus created especially for this study; while Brown corpus and LOB corpus function as auxiliary corpora. All the data discussed in this thesis are calculated by software, which is scientific, reliable, and objective enough. The research results show that the stylistics features of maritime business contracts are very different from that of British and American written languages. To be concrete:the high frequency of legal terms; the low frequency of personal pronouns; the longest mean word; the extensive usage of synonymous collocations; the longest mean sentence length; full use of declarative sentences; the special function of the "where" sentence; the tendentiousness in choosing cohesive devices; long paragraphs with fewer sentences.