Syntactic Features of Legal Documents of Business English(3)

The stipulations in the relative letter of credit should strictly conform to the terms stated in the Sales Confirmation in order to avoid the trouble of subsequent amendments.

The Agenda shall be established by mutual agreement.

Legal documents of business English have many adverbial clauses of condition. Since most of legal documents stipulate the obligations and confirm the rights, conditional sentences are often used to educe a certain conclusion. Adverbial clauses of condition are generally introduced by if, in case (that), in the event (that), unless, provided that, should, etc. For instance:

In the event that the Documents supplied by Party B are not in conformity with the stipulations in Sections 8.2, Party B shall, within the shortest possible time but not later than 30 days after the receipt of the Party A’s written notice, dispatch free of charge to Party A the missing or the correct and legible Documents.

Unless otherwise stipulated in the credit, banks will accept a document bearing a date of issuance prior to that of the credit, subject to such document being presented within the time limits set out in the credit.

Partial inversion usually takes place when a sentence is introduced by “should”, e.g.

Should either party be prevented from performing all or part of its obligations owing to force majeure, it shall be relieved of all or part of its obligations.

Should the Sellers fail to load the goods within the time as notified by the Buyers, on board the vessel booked by the Buyers after its arrival the port of shipment, all expenses such as dead freight, demurrage, etc., and consequences thereof shall be borne by the Sellers.

5. Postmodifiers

Modification is an important grammatical device for description and sentence expansion. Modifiers in a noun phrase may be classified into premodifiers and postmodifiers. Postmodifiers include all the items that appear after the headword. They are chiefly prepositional phrases (a textbook on English grammar), non-finite clauses (pupils standing outside the classroom), relative clauses (the actor who was absent) etc. One of the obvious tendencies in the development of Modern English is a greater frequency of premodifiers. This tendency, as it helps to achieve economy of expression, is most obvious in journalistic English. But in legal documents of business English, we often use nouns with long, complicated postmodifiers. This is another striking characteristic of written legal English to achieve precision. Postmodifiers are preferred because phrases or clauses can better define the noun they modify than single words that precede a noun. Here are two examples:

Other matters relating to this Contract shall be dealt with in accordance with the Terms of Delivery as specified overleaf.

Routine duties of the Joint Venture Company are to be discharged by the general manager appointed by the Board of Directors.

In particular, draftsmen like to use restrictive relative clauses as postmodifiers in legal documents of business English. The purpose of using restrictive relative clauses is to make the content more definite and distinct in the interest of eliminating misunderstanding. A restrictive relative clause is closely attached to the head. It gives essential information about the meaning of the antecedent. It forms an integral part of the noun phrase, without which the head cannot be identified as the specific object. For instances:

百度搜索“70edu”或“70教育网”即可找到本站免费阅读全部范文。收藏本站方便下次阅读，70教育网，提供经典英语论文Syntactic Features of Legal Documents of Business English(3)在线全文阅读。