A Comparative Study Of Chinese And English Business Contracts On Nominalization

With China’s entering the World Trade Organization, the international businessactivities between China and other countries are more and more frequent. Businesscontract, as an important legal guarantee of conducting business activities and safeguardingthe rights and interests of each part, has played an important role. Therefore, linguisticresearch of business contracts has caused wide attention of scholars. As a most powerfulresource of grammatical metaphor, nominalization has the function to make discourseobjective, concise and formal, because of which nominalization is widely used in businesscontracts. However, Chinese and English belong to two different language families. Thereare differences of the use of nominalization in Chinese and English business contracts. Soit is meaningful to have a comparative study of nominalization in Chinese and Englishbusiness contracts, which is also the reason for the author’s research in this paper.Basing on systemic functional linguists’ study on nominalization, this thesis conductsa contrastive study of nominalization in Chinese and English business contracts, and drawsthe following conclusions by doing statistical analysis of30Chinese and English businesscontracts:(1) Nominalization prevails not only in English business contracts but also inChinese business contracts. However, there are big differences of the frequencies ofnominalization between Chinese and English business contracts;(2) Both Chinese andEnglish business contracts have the same order of frequencies of the five types ofnominalization. However, the frequencies are quite different;(3) To express the samemeaning, there is significant difference between the sentence numbers in Chinese andEnglish business contracts;(4) The reasons cause the differences of nominalizationbetween Chinese and English business contracts can be explored from two perspectives:linguistic characteristics and modes of thinking;(5) In both Chinese and English businesscontracts, nominalization has ideational function, interpersonal function, and textualfunction to make the discourse concise, formal, objective, and coherent.