under the contract. When negotiating a contract a list of

contingencies must be agreed on and put into the contract.

When a manager makes up a contract he must not think only of his

one-side interest. He must think in terms of common interest with his

counterpart. Only then will he prove loyal to his partner. In case of

a contingency the Seller must notify the Buyers of a force majeure

right away. If it is done in due time the Buyer may take immediate

action to protect his interest.

A force majeure must be a proven fact. The Seller is to submit to

the Buyer a written confirmation issued by the Chamber of Commerce to

this effect. The duration of a force majeure is, as a rule, 4 or 6

months. After that the Buyer has a right to cancel the contract. The

Seller in this case has no right to claim any compensation for his

losses.

Claims and sanctions. A contract defines rights and obligations of

the parties involved. Most often the Buyer makes quality and quantity

claims on the Seller. The cause for complaint may be poor quality,

breakage, damage, short weight, leakage, etc. The Buyer must write a

statement of claim and mail it to the Seller together with the

supporting documents: Bill of Lading, Airway and Railway Bill, Survey

Report, Quality Certificate are documentary evidence. Drawings,

photos, samples are enclosed as proofs of claims. The date of a

complaint is the date on which it is mailed.

Claims can be lodged during a certain period of time, which is

usually fixed in a contract. During the claim period the Seller is to

enquire into the case and communicate his reply. He either meets the

claim or declines it. If a claim has a legitimate ground behind it the

parties try to settle it amicably. The Seller in turn is entitled to

make a claim on his counterpart if the Buyer fails to meet his

contractual obligations. The Seller may inflict penalties on the Buyer

if there is a default in payment. Financially, legitimate claims are

in large part settled by debit or credit notes [10, P. 12 – 28].

4. Types of contracts. Abbreviations

In order to speed up the preparation of contract documents and to

minimise possibility of errors in them, a unified standardised form of

contract documents, the Master Pattern for Contract Documents, has

been developed. It establishes principles and regulations for the

construction of standardised forms of documents used in foreign trade,

like Supplement to contract, Order and Order confirmation.

Supplement to contract is a business document which is an integral

part of the contract, containing amendments or additions to the

previously agreed contract conditions. The supplement should also be

agreed on and signed by both the exporter and the importer.

Order is a business document presenting the importer’s offer for

dealing which contains specific conditions of a future transaction.

Order Confirmation is a business document presenting the exporter’s

message containing unclaused acceptance of the order conditions. The

Master pattern has also been accepted as a basis for standardised

forms of enquiries and offers, used at pre-contract stages of dealing

[5, P.131 – 132].

Different firms and organisations trading regularly, work out

standardised forms of contracts for typical deals. Such standardised

contracts are printed and include typical rights and duties of the

contracting sides in selling and buying some goods and services. There

are special columns for the names of the Buyer and Seller, names of

goods, their quantity, prices and delivery terms. In case of declining

or adding some terms, people use supplementary columns in a contract

form.

Standardised forms of export and import deals differ greatly and it

makes them two general types of contracts [13, P.146]. Thus, there are

export and import contracts. They reflect different positions of

buyers and sellers in trading. Contracts in import trade are called

orders, and their submission warrancy, and delivery terms, as well as

sanctions are much harder towards the sellers than those ones in

export trade. Standardised forms of import contracts are sent to

potential buyers before getting commercial proposals and, actually,

before striking a deal. The languages of contracts are agreed upon on

the both sides. It goes without saying that information and style are

kept the same not depending on the language of contract.

As textual varieties, contracts are divided into administrative-

managerial, financial-economical, advertising, scientific-technical,

and artistic-publicational contracts(. Functional spheres of their

circulation can be easily guessed from names of contract types in this

classification, and are the subject of economic, rather than

linguistic, study.

Contracts may be differentiated by the subject of a deal. There are

export contracts for the sale of oil products, machinery tools, grain,

timber, the supply of goods, etc. Orders in import trade deal with

ordering and purchasing goods. They are often supported with requests,

remindings, verifications of different terms, guarantee and waving

inspection letters, and many others.

Goods in international trade are transported with the help of

multimodal (door-to-door) shipment. In contracts delivery and

acceptance terms are marked with the International Commercial Terms

(Incoterms) [10, P.16]. So, contracts can be classified in accordance

with the way of delivery. Most of Incoterms are represented as

abbreviations.

The usage of abbreviations, conventional symbols and contractions

is typical of all kinds of documents. Abbreviations are abundant, and

there are special dictionaries to decode them. They serve as signs of

the code supposed to be known only to the “initiated” [3, P.316].

On the whole, there are 14 official Incoterms of deliverance. They

denote:

1. The point of deliverance. EX Works means that the seller’s only

responsibility is to make the goods available at his premises.

EX Ship means that the seller shall make the goods available to

the buyer on board the ship at the destination named in the

sales contract. EX Quay means that the seller makes the goods

available to the buyer on the quay at the destination named in

the sales contract.

2. The way of deliverance. FOB means Free on Board. The goods are

placed on board a ship by the seller at a port of shipment named

in the sales contract. FAS means Free Alongside Ship. That means

that goods should be placed alongside the ship to fulfil the

seller’s obligations. FOR / FOT mean Free on Rail / Free on

Truck. Truck here relates to the railway wagons, and that makes

these abbreviations synonymous. FOB Airport is based on the same

main principle as the ordinary FOB term. The seller fulfils his

obligations by delivering the goods to the air carrier at the

airport of departure.

3. Payment terms. C & F means Cost and Fright. The seller must pay

the costs and fright necessary to bring the goods to the named

destination, but the risk of loss or damage to the goods is

transferred from the seller to the buyer when the goods pass the

ship’s rail in the port of shipment. CIF means Cost, Insurance

and Fright. This term is basically the same as C & F but with

the addition that the seller has to procure marine insurance

against the risk of loss or damage to the goods during the

carriage.

Thus, in Chapter 1 we have made an attempt to clarify some items of

the topic. They are the following:

The nature of the English of documents writing is determined by its

stylistic realisation in written English. The style of official

documents possesses its own features which are reflected in

standardised forms of different documents. They are peculiarities of

the vocabulary, grammar and syntactic constructions, which are the

subject of consideration in the practical part of this paper.

The main problem of writing contracts is embodied in the notion of

stylistic use. Formal style of business English is rather hard to

obtain and to follow. It remains mostly in written form, and its

peculiarities should be strictly observed. Some theoretical problems

of its functioning have already been considered. Nevertheless,

informal English influences it greatly, and even in routine papers we

may find deviations from the accepted form.

It can be explained by the fact that business is made by people,

and not robots. A person’s individuality, as well as emotions and

feelings, more and more often peer into a cool and logical world of

business, creating new problems and possibilities of business English

functioning in texts of contracts and other documents.

We have also defined contract as a typical realisation of formal

business English which possesses the same stylistic features and

follows the same goals as other kinds of business correspondence.

Contents of contract also have specific clauses, and they ensure

division of contracts into certain types in accordance with a side

initiating a deal, a sphere of making a deal, types of goods and their

delivery terms. Very often a way of deliverance is encoded with the

help of special abbreviations. Contracts also possess remarkable

linguistic features revealed in their texts, and they are the subject

of Chapter 2.

Chapter 2. Linguistic peculiarities of contracts

2.1. Contract as a type of text and its stylistic characteristics

From the linguistic point of view, a contract is a type of a

document, because any agreement is a completed document fixing some

information. As a type of text, contract has its own specific

characteristics. Stylistic peculiarities of all document texts are:

1. concreteness, conciseness, clearness of the stated idea;

2. high capacity of information;

3. strict logic;

4. clear rhythm of sentences;

5. accenting on the main idea with the help of word repetitions;

6. absence of connotational information;

7. a special system of clichйs and stamps;

8. usage of abbreviations, conventional symbols and marks;

9. usage of terms in their direct semantic meaning; preferential

usage of monosemantic words;

10. division of a text into chapters, paragraphs, points, often

numbered (clear compositional structure of a document);

11. usage of definite syntactic models;

12. graphic decoration of a document: quality of paper, quantity and

quality of illustrations, size and kind of print.

The main features of the style of contract are:

1. steady system of linguistic means in the text of contract;

2. lack of emotional colouring;

3. decoding character of language;

4. usage of a special symbolic system;

5. definite syntactic structure (the 12 above-enumerated items).

The style of contract defines some peculiarities and techniques of

its writing. Making contracts is different in some points from writing

business letters, such as an offer, an inquiry, a complaint, etc. Some

considerations important for business letters are not important for

contracts, and v.v. The main difference is that any contract is made

up by two contracting parties and contains information about many

subjects. So all points are to be approved by both parties. There are

certain clearly definable requirements for how to write contracts.

Generally, contracts should be formal, complete, clear, concrete,

correct and concise.( In contracts all possible informational details

are not suitable. So, while writing contracts we must observe all

peculiarities of standard English grammar, vocabulary use and

stylistic appropriation. A formal contract or agreement requires

considerations of neatness and attractive arrangement. Completeness of

any contract suggests the scope of all significant facts that have

reference to the issue of the agreement. Actually, you are expected to

explain what, how, and when you are going to deal with your partner.

The next element, - clearness, - is one of the most important,

because much depends on it. Clearness could be reached by the use of

simple short words, phrases and paragraphs where the both parties of a

contract explain their intentions and issues. Clearness of any

arguments actually defines your striking a deal or not.

The component which is closely connected with the previous one is

concreteness. Concreteness of a contract or an agreement is a part and

a parcel of any legal document. Besides that, the longer the document

is, the more attractive and vivid its contents should be.

The next two components are also significant. They are correctness

and conciseness. Correctness involves proper grammar use (tense-aspect

forms of the verb, verbals, articles, etc.), vocabulary use,

punctuation and formal style. Grammar should be checked with a special

care, otherwise it may produce a poor impression of the document and

non-seriousness of your interests. Conciseness is usually achieved by

the use of minimum words to express maximum of information.

As it has been noted above, any contract should be simple and clear,

concise and brief. Commercial correspondence often suffers from an old-

fashioned, pompous style of English which complicates the message and

gives the reader the feeling that he is reading a language he does not

understand. Though the language of contract is perhaps the most formal

among all kinds of business correspondence, and the vocabulary of such

correspondence is very specific, which is connected with its character

and a great number of legal terms, it should not be archaic. It should

be clear enough in its meaning.

The style, however, should not be too simple as it may become

discourteous and sound rude. Linguists (G. Leech, J. Svartvik, Ch.

Fries, O. Jespersen, M. Joos, I.V. Arnold, B.A. Ilyish, E.M. Gordon,

etc.) recommend the following stylistic devices that might make

agreements and contracts more polite: complex sentences joined with

conjunctions are preferable, rather than short sentences; passive

constructions rather than active; full forms rather than abbreviated

forms, where necessary.

The right tone should be neutral, devoid of a pompous language on

one hand, and an informal or colloquial language on the other hand.

Therefore, inappropriate vocabulary, idioms, phrasal verbs are not

allowed at all.

The both contracting parties should not experience any difficulties

in obtaining information, they should be able to understand what is

written. Misunderstandings are caused by a lack of thought and care.

It may happen if we use a lot of abbreviations, figures and

prepositions.

Abbreviations are very useful, because they are very quick to write

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