A Corpus-Based Study Of(in)Comprehensibility In Standard Form Contracts

Standard form contracts,as a variant of contracts with merits of being efficient and economical to close a deal,are discreetly elaborated by legal professionals to minimize possible risks.Incomprehensible or unintelligible terms and expressions in standard form contracts may cause laypersons' failure of understanding the contracts or protecting their interests.This paper analyzes the incomprehensibility in standard form contracts and the factors that may cause such incomprehensibility with the help of corpus linguistic tools.On the basis of previous studies,22 factors have been identified which are assumed to be likely to cause incomprehensibility.These factors are then employed to classify incomprehensibility into seven types which constitute the analytical framework of this study.After analysis of the 15 selected contracts(4 contract types),it is found that 16 of these factors cause difficulty in comprehension.Among them,“modifier-noun phrase and compound words” and “terminology difficulty” are the top two most frequent factors.(In)Comprehensibility relating to specialized knowledge and lexical complexity appear most frequently in selected contracts.Moreover,this study evaluates the extent of incomprehensibility of each contract and contract type by comparing their index of incomprehensibility which is calculated on the basis of method of variation coefficients.Upon comparison of the index of incomprehensibility,insurance contracts are the most difficult contract type,while user agreements are the easiest type.On the basis of research findings,this study suggests that both drafters and laypersons are recommended to work together for a better understanding of contracts.Linguists,regulators,and legislators are suggested to cooperate with each other and jointly set a practical criterion of drafting legal documents in plain language so as to draft more comprehensible and intelligible contracts and efficiently protect layperson's interests.