Stylistic

Analysis of
Business
Text
A contract as an example

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Introduction :
Business contracts, also known as legal contracts, are legally binding written agreements
between two or more business parties. They are enforceable in a civil court of law as long as
they follow specific contract laws. This « Cleaning Service Contract » describes the premises
of the work, schedules the tasks, allocates the staff, and finally identifies the different tasks to
be executed by employees. This text will be analysed at the graphological level, lexical level,
syntactic level

1. Graphological Features:
At the level of graphology, there is a recurrent use of capitalization in both types of titles; the
main title:  « CLEANING SERVICE CONTRACT » and the subtitles « DESCRIPTION OF
THE PREMISES », « SCHEDULE OF THE TASKS AND STAFF
ALLOCATION», « TASKS TO BE EXECUTED ». This use of capital letters refers to the
writer’s desire to draw the attention of the employee to the most important information and
clauses in the contract and to divide the text into parts by entitling them to facilitate
understanding and access to the information.
Numbering also serves the same aim which is clarifying and organizing the content to the
reader, we notice here the use of Latin numbers: I, II, III…
Along with these two graphological devices, we can find underlining which is used here
to highlight the essential tasks and make them prominent throughout the text. The use
of bullets also in the third part of this contract helps in prioritizing the tasks to be
executed and facilitating reading for the employee rather than writing a whole
paragraph full of sentences. All these devices aim at introducing a simple and easy
contract that is accessible and comprehensible by all employees.

2. Lexical Features:
In terms of lexis and vocabulary, we notice the repetition of some specific words related to
the field of cleaning like for example: “sweeping” *4, “cleaning” *7, “washing” *2,
“waste” *2,” disinfection*2”. This repetition increases the clarity and the precision of the
text as it specifies the nature of tasks required from the staff. Another distinctive lexical
feature is the formality of words used in this contract for instance “specifications”,
“premises”, “delegation”, “allocation”,” executed” …This type of words brings a level of
seriousness to the text as well as it increases the formality of the language, the accuracy
and the exactness of meaning. This formality is also highlighted by the use of loan words
like for example the word “archive” *2.

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 3. Syntactic\ grammatical Features:
At the syntactic level, we notice the frequent use of the parallel structure especially in the
first and third part.
 1st part:
“The office space on the 8th floor covers [……] including [….]”
“The office space on the 1st floor covers [….] and concerns [….]”
This repetition of the same sentence structure with the use of complex sentence and
compound sentence helps in organizing and clarifying the information for the reader
especially when describing the premises by compressing a big number of numerical data
into one sentence.
 3rd part:
The recurrent use of ing clause:
“Cleaning and sweeping of floors and tiles”
“Washing dishes”.
This choice of such clause type (ing clause) is due to the writer’s desire to increase
conciseness and directness. In addition, he intends to specify the nature of the task in a
clear short way and not to complicate the structure. Hence, he tends to avoid ambiguity and
redundancy. Furthermore, what is more remarkable is the use of long and complex noun
phrases such as “The Office of the Delegation of the European Union to the Republic of
Mauritius” which is employed twice to cover more details in one noun phrase thus
avoiding wordiness. Finally, the writer has recourse to the passive voice “must be
executed”, “to be executed”, “is closed”

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