7. The style of official documents (the substyles of diplomatic and legal documents).

The style of official documents has a definite communicative aim and its own system of interrelated language means. The main aim of this type of communication is to reach an agreement and to state the conditions binding/oblige two parties in an undertaking. This most general aim of the style of official documents predetermines the peculiarities of the style, such as their composition, the extensive use of special terminology and cliches, the use of abbreviations (particularly abundant in military documents).

The Style of Diplomatic Documents

To the sphere of international relations we attribute the style of diplomatic documents, such as treaties, agreements, conventions declarations, protocols, acts, engagement. The most striking feature of such documents is their composition. The principal parts of diplomatic documents in their usual order are:

-The preambleor preliminary recitals, setting out the names of parties (Heads of State, States or Governments), the purpose for which the document was included, the "resolve" of the parties to enter into it, and the names and designations of the plenipotentiaries.

-The formal (or final) clauses dealing with technical or formal points relative to the application or entry into force of the document. Usually such clauses relate separately to the following: the date of the documents, the mode of acceptance, opening of the documents for signature, entry into force, duration, etc.

- Formal acknowledgement of signature, Signature by the plenipotentiaries. Because of the necessity for absolute precision and the avoidance of any ambiguity which is important in international relations.

Another important feature of this style is the use of special terms. Diplomatic terminology includes terms proper (e.g. to accredit, dispatch, ambassador; article (part of a treaty), clause (part of a document), party (either side in a contract)).

The use of non-assimilated borrowings, mainly from Latin and French. There are also very many obsolete and archaic words (e.g. hereto, henceforth, thereon, whereof, whereupon). They clearly show that the style of diplomatic documents is very conservative; it changes very slowly preserving the tendency to use the same stereotyped words and phrases for centuries.

The Style of Legal Documents

Legal documents are usually set down as a solid block of script whose long lines extend from margin to margin with practically no spacing and punctuation to defeat fraudulent deletions and additions. The sentences in a document are usually very long and entire document can be composed of a single sentence and so there was no much help from punctuation to understand it and, besides, since punctuation marks are used mostly as prompts for oral reading of a text and legal documents are composed for reading, they mostly do without them. One more reason for avoiding punctuation is to prevent any possible forgery by changing the places of punctuation marks. Capitalisation was chosen as a means of revealing structure, content and logical progression to make up for the lack of punctuation.

Lexically, legal documents contain many archaisms, borrowings from French and Latin which add a touch of formality. Legal English contains only complete major sentences, mostly in the form of statements.