A Study Of Commissives In English Business Contracts

Commissive, as one of the typical linguistic phenomena in people's daily communication, is the most essential speech act in English business contracts. An English contract is a legal document which plays an essential role in stipulating rights and obligations of the contracting parties in business activities. The terms in business contracts are mainly drawn up in the form of commissives. Since the context where the commissive is performed is of great importance for the forms and effects of commissives, and the commissives made by the contracting parties in a business contract are under certain commercial laws and social ethics, the commissives turn out to have certain special linguistic features.The present thesis is an is an empirical study within the theoretical framework of Austin and Searle's speech act theory, adopting qualitative and quantitative methods to analyze the speech acts of commissives in the samples of English business contacts.The commissives in English business contracts have the following features: 1) Generally, there is no direct commissives in business contract, because there is no performative verbs of commissive. 2) The articles of English business contacts contain all the Searle's felicity conditions for commissives. 3) The commissives in the contract are realized mainly by modality which has strict legal effects. 4) In English contracts, the commissive verbs are tacit, but the illocutionary force of commissive is realized. 5) Syntactically, most of the commissives are performed in long declarative sentences and conditional coordinate sentences to avoid fraudulent addition and clarify the conditions for obligations and rights. 6) In terms of semantic features, most of the commissives concern the hearer's wish or want that the speaker will perform a certain act,and the speaker's intention to perform a certain act.This thesis,which applies speech act theory of commissive in analyzing the commissives of English business contracts, will hold some practical values in understanding, drawing up and translating English business contracts in a more effective way.