Nataliia Pavliuk, Anna Kurashyna
DOI: 10.36074/grail-of-science.21.02.2025.105
ABSTRACT
The paper studies English means of expressing obligation in contracts for an unlimitednumber of users, i.e. the contracts “signed” by the company and the users of its website. Theobligation is expressed with the help of deontic modal auxiliary verbs, finite forms of the verbs(Present Simple and Future Simple Tense forms), and phrases and words (verbs, nouns andadjectives) denoting obligation. Their semantic and grammatical features are analysed within thecorpus compiled of 17 contracts for an unlimited number of users that contains 64000 words. Thecorpus analysis was carried out in SketchEngine software to investigate quantitative and qualitativefeatures of the linguistic units in question, analyse their use in context. The language of obligationin contracts used by contract drafters is also in the focus of investigation. The result of investigationshows that modal auxiliary verbs as well as specified expressions are widely used to denoteobligation. The shades of meaning of the expressions slightly differ but they all have the functionto express obligation of the party under the contract provisions. Thus, it was possible to classify allthese semantic and grammatical means into two groups, namely expressing obligation viagrammatical means and expressing obligation via semantic means.
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(PDF) English Means of Expressing Obligation in Contracts for Unlimited Number of Users. Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/389465918_English_Means_of_Expressing_Obligation_in_Contracts_for_Unlimited_Number_of_Users [accessed May 02 2025].
