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Article published In:
Languages in Contrast
Vol. 19:2 (2019) ► pp.256–279

The use of -ing and -ndo forms in sales contracts

An English-Spanish contrastive analysis

ORCID logo | Universidad de Valladolid (Spain)
| University of Ottawa (Canada)
| Universidad de Valladolid (Spain)

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.

Keywords: comparable corpus, distribution, frequency of use, -ing form, -ndo form, legal language, English/Spanish
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
  • References
Published online: 21 September 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lic.17009.lop
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