The use of - ing and - ndo forms in sales contracts: An English-Spanish contrastive analysis

• Published in: Languages in contrast 2019-01, Vol.19 (2), p.256-279
• Main Authors: López Arroyo, Belén, Roberts, Roda P., Moreno Pérez, Leticia
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Contracts; Corpus linguistics; English language; Frequency of occurrence; Legal language; Spanish language; Suffixes; Syntax; Terms of sale
• ISSN: 1387-6759; 1569-9897
• DOI: 10.1075/lic.17009.lop

This paper analyzes the use of the - ing and - ndo forms in English and Spanish in sales contracts. More specifically, it aims to answer three questions: 1. Do the - ing and the - ndo forms occur more frequently in sales contracts than in general language? 2. Do English sales contracts contain more - ing forms used in more syntactic functions than the Spanish - ndo in Spanish sales contracts? 3. Are both the - ing forms and the - ndo forms found in all or most parts of the sales contracts retained for this study? Our study is based on two comparable corpora of English and Spanish: a legal corpus containing sales contracts, and a general corpus. Our corpora provide the following answers to the questions posed: 1. Both the - ing and the - ndo forms occur more frequently in sales contracts than in general language; 2. There are more - ing forms in English sales contracts than there are - ndo forms in Spanish sales contracts, but in both cases, they are used in a variety of syntactic functions; 3. Both the - ing forms and the - ndo forms are found in most parts of the sales contracts used in this study.