The Stylistic Study Of English Business Contracts

With the economic development and globalization, with the deepening of China's opening-up to the outside world, and especially with China's entry into the WTO, the development in business transactions has grown rapidly and business activities between China and other countries have become more and more frequent at the same time. Business contracts are an essential element in business activities. As a legal document and weapon, business contract functions greatly in standardizing the movement, enhancing the development, being on guard for payment risk and consolidating the achievements of international trade. English, as the most important language in all the international communications, inevitably plays a main role in this aspect. Thus, English business contract is an agreement enforced by law. It concerns the economic activities of different countries, different enterprises, and different organizations. And English language in business contracts, as a sub-variety of Legal English, plays an increasingly important role in business life.Yet with further development of the business communications, disputes arising from the contracts also mount up. In order to avoid possible disputes, it is basic for the practitioners of international business to comprehend, formulate and translate such contracts professionally. Mastering the stylistic features of the contracts, in an effective way, helps them achieve this competence.This thesis generalizes the stylistic characteristics of English business contracts at lexical, syntactic and textual levels based on the stylistic theory. Then it further discusses the classification, components of business contracts and formats of several types of business contracts. It consists of six chapters. Chapter One is to introduce the current situation of the stylistic study.Chapter Two is the literature review of the development of stylistics, the representative scholars of stylistics and their contributions to the stylistic study.Chapter Three illustrates the stylistic features of business contracts at lexical level, syntactic level and textual level. At lexical level, English business contracts mainly demonstrate the following characteristics of the archaic word frequency, formal words, technical terms, juxtaposition of words, use of hedges, model verbs, loanwords, repetition of the same word and capitalization. The characteristics at syntactic level are more complex. An analysis is done through the aspects of word types, grammatical items, clause types and sentence types. (1) word types: nouns, prepositions and articles enjoy a much higher frequency than other word types. (2) grammatical items: the frequent use of nominalization, shall+verb, post-modification, adverbial phrases and extensive use of present tense and passive voice. (3) clause types: conditional clauses are frequently used. (4) sentence types: long sentences are frequently used and most of the sentences are declarative sentences. At textual level, the cohesive devices of grammatical devices, lexical cohesion, logical connectors are employed. Parallel structures are often employed to achieve precision and clarity. Two categories of logical connectors are conjunctive adverbs and subordinating conjunctions. They are employed to show the logical relationship between clauses. The function of lexical cohesion to textual cohesion is also discussed in this chapter.On top of these, in Chapter Four, the thesis introduces classification of business contracts. The five main types are sales contract, counter-trade contract, leasing contract, engineering contract, foreign investigation and joint venture agreement and transfer of technology agreement.In Chapter Five, components and formats of contracts are generalized. Generally, a contract consists of four parts: 1) Title; 2) Preamble; 3) Body; 4) Witness. In the end, several formats of business contracts are introduced.In the conclusion part,the author states the summary and restates the three key findings.