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

Abstract

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.