The use of -ing and -ndo forms in sales contracts
An English-Spanish contrastive analysis
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.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.-ing forms and -ndo forms: Uses and functions
- 2.1-ing forms in English
- 2.2-ndo forms in Spanish
- 3.The genre of sales contracts
- 4.Methodology
- 4.1Establishing two comparable corpora
- 4.1.1Comparable corpus of sales contracts
- 4.1.2Comparable corpus of general texts
- 4.2Method of analysis
- 5.Results
- 6.Analysis
- 6.1Frequency of use
- 6.2Morphological types
- 6.2.1-ing forms in English
- 6.2.2-ndo forms
- 6.3Distribution of -ing and -ndo forms in sales contracts
- 6.3.1-ing forms in English sales contracts
- 6.3.2-ndo forms in Spanish sales contracts
- 7.Conclusions
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
-
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