Analysis Of Speech Acts In English Contract Discourse

The English contract is a legal text signed during transnational business activities, which plays an essential role in stipulating rights and obligations of the parties involved in a certain international business transaction. Over a long period of time, many scholars have done fruitful researches on the English contract, mainly focusing on lexical features, syntax features, discourse structure, rhetorical features and text style. These achievements bear great significance to the study and writing of the English contract; however, they are not enough to reflect the pragmatic functions of the English contract as a legal and practical style. Therefore, it is necessary to analyze English contract discourse from the pragmatic perspective. On the basis of Speech Act Theory and other related theories in pragmatics, this thesis aims to analyze the types, frequency, distribution, and performance of speech acts in English contract discourse. Furthermore, the thesis makes an attempt at exploring the coherence of English business discourse from the perspective of locutionary acts, illocutionary acts and perlocutionary acts.American philosopher-linguist John R. Searle classified illocutionary acts into five basic types, of which directives includes order, prohibition, requirement, permission and authorization. In consideration of English contract discourse's pragmatic function of regulating the parties'rights and obligations, we separate authorizations from directives. Through imputing the frequently adopted performative verbs of six types of speech acts (declarations, directives, authorizations, commisives, expressives and assertives) into the software Antconc 3.2.1 to make investigations on the corpus of 25 copies of sample English contracts, we get two findings. One finding is that in English contract discourse, directives, authorizations, commisives and declarations are mainly performed, among which the most frequently performed are directives, followed by authorizations and commisives; declarations are less common;expressives and assertives are rarely performed. The other finding is concerned about the specific distribution of different types of speech acts in English contract discourse: in the Preamble, commisives and declarations are mainly performed; in the Body, directives, authorizations and commisives are mainly performed; in the Closing part, directives and authorizations are mainly performed. Besides, lots of examples are chosen to analyze the performance of speech acts in different parts of English contract discourse. On this basis, this thesis further interprets the discourse coherence of the English contract from the locutionary acts, illocutionary acts and perlocutionary acts. The interpretation shows that different categories of speech acts performed in the English contract are a coherent and unified whole, which not only reflects the discourse coherence of the English contract, but also achieves the special pragmatic function of regulating the parties'rights and obligations.Carried out from the perspective of pragmatics, the research on the phenomenon of the English contract language and its variation is of great help to understand and grasp the particularity of contract language as well as the pragmatic functions of contract discourse. What's more, the research bears certain referential significance to the international business negotiation and contract drafting, etc.