Substitution In English Business Contractual Texts

Discourse analysis is a new subject and has developed rapidly since it came into existence in the fifties of last century. With the language in use as the study object, discourse analysis aims to reveal better how various types of discourse function in practical communication. The development of this subject enriches the theories of translation to a great degree. Cohesion is one of the central topic of discourse analysis, and it is one of the cores that translation focuses on. Therefore, it is very feasible to apply cohesion theory into translation.As a special but typical type of discourse, English business contracts have attracted attention of various scholars. Most of them concentrate their efforts on the study of stylistic features of contracts, for example, formalism, archaism, preference of long sentences and terminology, nominalization and so on. However, little effort has been made to study the linguistic functions of substitution in English business contracts. In light of this, this paper first takes the theory of Halliday & Hasan on cohesion as the guidance and combines it with relevant views by such scholars as Professor Hu Zhuanglin, then collects, analyzes and compares typical samples of English business contracts. Drawing on the comparison and conclusion derived accordingly, this paper aims to analyze the application and functions of various specific substitution devices, and serve as a reference for the reading, translating, drafting and education of English business contracts.Through the comparison of analysis results, this paper comes to the following conclusion: in English business contractual texts, there are four types of substitution in total. In addition to nominal substitution, verbal substitution and clausal substitution put forward by Halliday and Hasan, there is another distinctive type of substitution, that is, adverbial substitution. To put it more concretely, nominal substitution usually applied includes five types: pronoun substitution, hyponymy, "one" or "that", the same and a distinctive type of nominal substitution unitary to English business contractual texts; there is only one type of verbal substitution, that is, substitute "do" and other participle forms of "do". The clausal substitution only takes place in environments of report clause and condition clause. Besides, the distinctive type of substitution-adverbial substitution in English business contracts is realized through "so".