Chapter One INTRODUTION
1.1Need for the Study
Following the Reform and Opening up’s policy and strategy implemented allover in our country, there is a fast growth for various economic activities inpeople’sdaily life, a great proportion of which are foreign economic activities taking placebetween Chinese and other countries’ economic communities. English as theinternational language is commonly used as the basic communicative tool in theseactivities.The contract text bearing contract rights and obligations of the parties is anaccordance that both the parties should executive the contract, and is also the mostdirect and objective court evidence. In other words, for the foreign economic activitiesthe English contract has a big effect.According to the information from the United States Department of Commerce,the NetEase News said that China became the country that had the largest foreigntrade volume in the world in 2013. With the international business trades’ growth,English contract disputes become increasingly tricky and complex. Compared withthe disputes among domestic companies, those kinds of disputes have worse negativeinfluences on both the foreign investors and the international trade development inChina: Firstly, the disputes could impair the confidence of the foreign investors in thefuture. Before they have the business with Chinese companies, the foreign companieswould be very cautious to any investment activity and would evaluate the potentialbusiness threats. Secondly, the disputes can have a negative influence to internationaleconomic reputation of China. The quantity of international business will be reduced.Finally, the economic development could be hindered because of these disputes. Thus,from a long point of view, people’s daily lives are probably also affected by theeconomic stagnancy.
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1.2Significance of the Study
As what is mentioned before this paragraph, the vagueness can enable the oral orwritten language more explanations under many different situations and contexts. For example, to attract the customers’ attention, the abuses of certain ambiguities cantransmit some messages.However, this can’t happen in the legal documents. Forlegitimacy, all the parties in the contracts must draft carefully andunambiguously.Because contracts are bound to the civil rights and obligations that thecontract parties own, the accuracy of each word or sentence should be kept, and thedocuments’ legitimacy is the assurance to show the true meanings of contracts.Ifitexpresses vaguely, the contract will come into risks. The ambiguity would causetrade frictions and legal litigation.Any process of writing may be involved in the ambiguous expression from theview of the language research.We must understand the basic regulations of ambiguityand the important measures of language in order to cease ambiguities to occur.The language ambiguity is a common issue in different linguistic texts no matterin oral or written. The exchanging information between human beings is required toavoid ambiguities during the course. And the legal files used in the business needmore accuracy and less ambiguity.So from the research about the syntactic, theambiguous reasons are the foundation for the thesis. Furthermore,the thesis alsoprovides several strategies to disambiguate possible misunderstanding in legalcontract, which assure the transaction development and lower the risks in thebusiness.
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Chapter Two LITERATURE REVIEW
2.1 Overview of Ambiguity
Making the review of literatures achieves the purpose to collect the differentviewpoints from the different works including the linguistic books, the philosophicbooks and the legal documents. According to linguistic principles and philosophictheories, some viewpoints of scholars in disparate periods are introduced andambiguitiesare analyzed from different standpoints like morphology, pragmatics, syntaxand phonology (Gerffrey,1981, p.32). Then there are some researches about the analysisof the contracts from “the historical, explanatory and feature views” (Diman, 2013, pp.121-124).There are a large number of different ways to explanation the ambiguity. But whatis the true meaning of the ambiguity and what is the best definition of the ambiguity?As we know, ambiguity is a very normal phenomenon in spoken and written language (Stephen, 1976, p. 16). Lots of scholars try to give it an accurate definition. Wang(2007, pp. 27-28) and Zhen (2008, p. 35) think that the words and the sentences can beunderstood in completely different ways, because they have semantically reasonableand grammatically structured expressions. And this causes the ambiguity. Zhao believesthat “the ambiguity can be explained by more than one ways”(2012, pp. 15-17). BlackDictionary makesits own definition about ambiguity: “Ambiguity is the state of havingdifficulties to understand or explain the meaning because of the syntactic, semantic,lexical or other element in the languages” (Bolinger, 1990, p. 376).
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2.2 Overview of Business Contracts
The agreement of cooperative partners is essentially important to start the businessoperation, which is based on the business contracts. Costs and risks of contractualparties are pided in the contracts. Drafting business contracts can promote thebusiness and exchange, which is very important. And wrangles could be avoided as well.Different rules, which guarantee and promote the international business, govern thecontracts that bestow the rights and the obligations on the twoparties (Throntong, 2012,pp. 132-232). In the past couples of years, we felt puzzled of the slight differences betweengeneral contracts and business contract, or even misunderstand them.There are many definitions of contract in China:“A contract shall be an agreement whereby the parties establish, change ofterminate their civil relationship” from General Principles of the Civil Law of People’sRepublic of China, Act 85(2009, p.9).“Contracts referred to in this Law are agreements between equal natural persons,legal persons and other organizations for the purpose of establishing, altering andterminating mutual civil rights and obligations” fromContract Law of People’s Republicof China, Act 2(2009, p.6).We can also find more definitions in western legal researchers’ writings:“A contract is legally binding agreement between two or more parties or a set oflegal binding promises made by one party or more” (Lindsay,1992, p.23).“An agreement between two parties by which both are bound in law and which cantherefore be enforced in a court or other equivalent forum”(Turner,2007, p.47).
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Chapter Three RESEARCH METHODOLOGY..... 25
3.1 Research Questions ...... 25
3.2 Data Selection ...... 26
3.3 Data Processing.... 26
3.3.1 Data analysis method ........ 26
3.3.2 Data classification ..... 27
Chapter Four SYNTACTIC AMBIGUITY WITHIN BUSINESS CONTRACTS.......... 29
4.1 Syntactic Ambiguity within Business Contracts .......... 29
4.2 Disambiguation Strategies ........... 52
Chapter Five CONCLUSION......... 58
5.1 Main Findings ...... 58
5.2 Limitations of the Present Study .......... 59
5.3 Suggestions for Further Research ........ 59
Chapter Four SYNTACTIC AMBIGUITY WITHIN BUSINESSCONTRACTS AND DISAMBIGUITY STRATEGIES
4.1 Syntactic Ambiguity within Business Contracts
Analyzing tool has been adopted by the author to classify various ambiguoussentence examples from business contracts in the previous chapter. And from thismoment, the author is going to elaborate these sentences in detail. It could be seen that Sentence 1 and 2 both are clear, because “that holds thecompany shares” and “holding the company shares” alike, as the post-modifiers,modify “any legal subject.” For Sentence 3 and 4, things is a bit different. In these cases,post-modifiers are moved forward to become “pre-modifiers.” It happens that whenconvert a post-modifier into a pre-modifier, the latter is condensed, meaning shortenedand simplified, and has semantic lost in meaning. In the third sentence, the meaning of“any company share holding legal subject” is a little confusing, letting out anotherimplication as “a company share holding legal subject.” It is better to be changed into“any company-share-holding legal subject” for the purpose of clarification. Throughthese examples, the conclusion could be drawn that hyphenating the phrasal adjectivesto avoid pre-modifier’s ambiguity is feasible.
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CONCLUSION
The way to distinguish the ambiguity in legal documents, especially contracts, andthe way to eliminate the distinguish are all indicated in the chapters above through theresearch about different examples. Because of the limitation in this thesis, furtherresearch are needed about this subject. The effort concentrating on the research about the ambiguity that is in the syntaxlevel and appears in the contracts and legal documents is made the author.The ambiguity in pragmatic, morphology, syntax, phonology, phonetics andsemantics cases are found out as the first aim of this thesis. The research focuses on thecontracts and a narrowed study scope.In the second section, the thesis uses different ways to interpret the syntaxstructure. The mechanics are utilized to eliminate the ambiguity. The modifiers and therelationship with the modified parts can cause the ambiguity. The classification in detailis fully shown in this section.
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References (omitted)