A Discourse Analysis Of Business Contracts From The Perspective Of Register Theory

Business contract is the essential link between business entities in China and aboard. In recent years, with the continuous growth of international business operations, the business contracts are often used, thus the requirements on its form and language are more and more specific and standardized. Driven by this situation, the researchers gradually had a strong interest in it. However, most of the existed studies are limited in the stylistics, namely the researchers only stay on simple descriptions of the stylistic features of business contracts. So far, there are seldom researches which use the register theory to discuss the discourse of international business contract in the present Chinese linguistics, the linguistic studies of business contracts in China are just at their beginning step. The related researches on the pure language level are very few, and these studies still stay on business mails, laws and principles which are related to business activities. Therefore, we could see that there is enough space of linguistics on business contracts analysis.Register theory are usually applied to study some daily expressions such as language in blog, college, net work and so on. However, scholars rarely used this theory on business contracts research, and most of the studies on business contracts stay on the level of macro linguistic. Given this, the author tries to adopt the comparative, quantitative and qualitative method to analyze the business contract under the register theory and to prove the validity of register theory in the contract discourse analysis. By analyzing the context and language features in contract discourse, the author finds that the register theory not only can explain the semantic of contract discourse, but also can dig its deep meaning.There are six chapters in this paper. The first chapter introduces the questions and research objectives of the study. The second chapter reviews the relevant researches on business contracts and register theory in China and abroad. The third chapter introduces the research methods, analysis processes, data collection and sorting. In the fourth and fifth chapters, the author analyzes business contracts from three aspects: field, tenor and mode, and discusses the influences of these three factors on the business contract. The six chapter makes conclusions for the whole paper. To sum up, the discourse analysis of business contract not only can help us understand the semantic of contract easier, but also can improve the successful rate of business communication and reduce the economic losses. Meanwhile, it will helpful to researches on business contract interpretation.