AN ONTOLOGY OF AUTHENTIC CONTRACT NEGOTIATION: IMPLICATIONS FOR ENGLISH FOR LEGAL PURPOSES PEDAGOGY
Back to Page
Authors: Anthony Townley
Keywords: contract negotiation, e-mail communication, English for legal purposes, genre discourse analysis
Abstract: My presentation reports on the negotiation of a confidentiality agreement based on findings from a linguistic-based study of an international M&A transaction involving lawyers and bankers across cultural contexts in Turkey, France, Portugal and the United Kingdom. Negotiation activities involved the interaction of these different professionals with their own interpretive agendas and communicative expertise (Candlin & Crichton, 2011). Nevertheless, the interdependence between these individual differences and the common discourse activity was stabilized by the shared use of a genre repertoire of email communication and the intertextual use of Track-Changes and Markup as a discourse type to negotiate amendments of the Confidentiality Agreement. I use genre and discourse analysis methodology to account for an (intertextually orientated) ontology of this authentic contract negotiation. The findings from this study should prove pedagogically useful to provide insights into the range of discourse competencies and professional communicative expertise that is needed by lawyers to negotiate commercial contracts in English.