A Critical Analysis Of Insurance Contract Texts

As social economy develops, insurance companies spread quickly at home and abroad. Insurance contracts (other names as insurance and insurance policy) have become a typical type of nonliterary texts in daily life as well. As a discourse type, insurance contract texts are bound to reflect and consolidate certain ideologies and power relations in the insurance domain. So here the author feels it necessary to make a critical analysis of insurance contracts using theories of critical linguistics. Concerning about the limited space of the paper, the author will not mention other aspects, but only analyze the insurance contracts from two aspects. One part of analysis is to employ the approach of critical linguistics to inspect the generic intertextuality of insurance contracts in the light of historical and social contexts of insurance contracts. The other part of analysis is to use critical approach to inspect the grammatical forms in insurance contracts. In this part the author will adopt Halliday's systemic-functional grammar and transformation, a term from TG grammar but with a different idea from that in TG as fundamental methodologies.After the critical analysis of insurance contracts, the author concludes that the Insurer manages to establish and sustain his wanted unequal power relations between the Insurer and the Insured of insurance domain, that is, the Insurer, acting as the power-holder, possesses the power of hegemonic domination over the Insured acting as the subordinate. And all his intentions are reflected by the linguistic forms in insurance contracts with certain ideological meanings. At the same time, the linguistic structures of insurance contracts with certain ideological assumptions will help the Insurer to consolidate and maintain his wanted inequality of power relations between the Insurer and the Insured. All such attempts of the Insurer is fundamentally in service of his aims of obtaining and maintaining to the largest extent his fundamental economic interests, because ideology is in service of power struggles, and is fundamentally in service of struggles for political and economic interests.But the Insurer's designed power relationship between the Insurer and the Insured is exactly opposite to the normal power relationship inherent in insurance, which is inferred from the buying and selling relation between two sides and both sides' fundamental natures and characteristics. Therefore, the author intends to unveil this unreasonable and unequal phenomenon through the critical analysis of insurance contracts. But the effectiveness of resistance to this phenomenon and the realization of change depend on people developing a critical consciousness of domination and its modalities, rather than just experiencing them. The more practical objective of this paper is therefore to make a contribution to the general raising of consciousness of exploitative power relations between the Insurer and the Insured of insurance domain, through focusing upon language, thus to make an alteration of this unreasonable and unequal phenomenon in order to ensure both sides' fundamental economic interests depending on the public's efforts.