Grammatical Cohesive Devices In English Contract Law Texts

Since Halliday and Hasan's seminal work on cohesion in 1976, a lot of research on textual cohesion has been done. However, there are relatively few studies on cohesion of legal language. The present thesis intends to analyze the grammatical cohesive devices in English contract law texts on the basis of Halliday and Hasan's (1976) theory of cohesion.Legal discourse has become a topic of interest among researchers since the 1970s. On the one hand, the language of law plays an important role in legal practice; on the other hand, law is a fertile field for linguistic research. With the development of forensic linguistics, there have been many studies on legal language. However, we seldom find scholars investigate the cohesive devices in legal language.Contract law texts have their own particular features. Since they are concerned with the obligations and rights of the parties, the highest level of precision and strictness is demanded. Therefore, the cohesive devices employed in the English contract law texts are assumed to show special patterns.The author does a statistical analysis of the distribution of different types of grammatical cohesive devices (including reference, substitution, ellipsis, and conjunction) used in the English contract law texts and analyzes the different types of grammatical cohesive devices in the English contract law texts with detailed illustrations. By doing this, the author aims to provide a clear description of the grammatical cohesive devices employed in English contract law texts and to find out the overall patterns in the choice of grammatical cohesive devices used in English contract law texts.The study is based on a corpus made of the following four English contract law texts: United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods (CISG) (1980), UNIDROIT's Principles of International Commercial Contracts (PICC) (1994), The Principles of European Contract Law (PECL) (1998), and Uniform Commercial Code (UCC). There are altogether 199,118 English words in the corpus. First, the occurrences of all the four types of non-structural, grammatical cohesive devices in the four English contract law texts are identified and classified according to Halliday and Hasan's (1976) classification method; secondly, their respective occurrence frequencies are calculated and statistical analyses are provided; thirdly, detailed illustrations and discussions of different kinds of grammatical cohesive devices in the English contract law texts are provided and correspondent examples are analyzed; finally, the specific features of grammatical cohesive devices employed in English contract law texts are summarized and the reasons behind are explained.First, it is found that, on the whole, grammatical cohesive devices are employed very frequently—as many as 158.745 instances of grammatical cohesive items are identified per thousand words, which means that grammatical cohesive devices play a very important role in achieving cohesion in these English contract law texts. Secondly, as to the different types of grammatical cohesive devices, there are significant differences in their occurrence frequencies. Reference is the most frequently employed while substitution and ellipsis are rarely identified in the English contract law texts. Conjunction stands in between. Finally, the author also finds that grammatical cohesive devices used in the English contract law texts are not as diversified as those in texts of other kinds of language registers. The particular features of grammatical cohesive devices employed in English contract law texts can be attributed to the specific characteristics of legal language.It is hoped that the findings of the study can contribute to the understanding of English contract laws, the teaching and learning activities of legal English, and also the legal translation practice.