A Contrastive Corpus-Based Study of Selected American and Egyptian Legal Contracts

Document Type : Academic research papers

Authors

1 The Department of English Language and Literature - The Faculty of Arts - The Faculty of Women for Arts, Science, and Education - Cairo - Egypt

2 Professor of Linguistics, Faculty of Education ,Ain Shams University – Egypt.

3 Assistant Professor of Linguistics,The Faculty of Women for Arts, Science & Education-Ain Shams University – Egypt.

Abstract

Legal contracts of purchase and sale are frequently dealt with by laypeople, whose comprehension of the language of contracts has to increase. This paper aims at comparing and contrasting the transitivity system of American and Egyptian legal contracts to get to know how experience is construed and why. Furthermore, it tries to enrich the literature of Arabic legal discourse as studies in this field are very rare. It also attempts to prove the distinctiveness of the language of contracts. The study adopts the transitivity system of Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar (2014) as the theoretical framework for the qualitative analysis, and a corpus-based approach for the quantitative analysis. The corpus comprises six American and six Egyptian contracts of purchase and sale. The results show the distinctiveness of both languages of contracts by using special processes realized by special verbs. Both corpora mostly resort to the material process to describe actions and obligations, and they recurrently use the relational and verbal processes. The other processes are infrequent since the existential and causative processes have a special nature. Such contracts are not concerned with sensing or physiological and psychological behavior, which explains why the mental and behavioral processes are rare.

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Buhūth
Volume 5, Issue 5
Social Sciences and Humanities and Languages
May 2025
Pages 1-45

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