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DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.20534/EJLPS-16-4-93-98
Konstantina Vadasi, University of the Aegean, Department of Mediterranean Studies, Informatics Laboratory E-mail: [email protected] Frantzi Katerina T., University of the Aegean, Associate Professor of Informatics - Corpus Processing Department of Mediterranean Studies, Informatics Laboratory
E mail: [email protected]
The BanCo Corpus for the Greek Bank Contracts Special Language Study
Abstract: Corpus-based approaches are highly appreciated, nowadays, for the complete and accurate study of the language. On the other hand, there is an increasing need for the study of dynamic Special Languages, such as the Language of Bank Contracts, due to its important applications, such as specialized monolingual and multilingual dictionaries, human and machine-translation, etc. This work presents the Corpus of the Greek Bank Contracts (BanCo), constructed for the quantitative and qualitative analysis of the SL of bank contracts.
Keywords: Languages for Specific Purposes, Corpus-based studies, Bank Contracts.
1. Languages for Specific Purposes er, researchers use various terms to describe what
A Language for Specific Purposes (LSP) or a Kocourek essentially considers a unitary concept,
Special Language (SL) is a language used in a particular scientific or professional field. According to Hoffmann [6, 16], an LSP provides "a complete set of linguistic phenomena that occur within a defined communication sphere, limited by specific areas, intentions and conditions". Hoffman stresses that "each LSP represents all the language resources used in a limited communication sphere in a specific knowledge area, so it is possible to achieve cognitive work and performed exchange of information between specialists in the same field" [7, 298, 28, 2, 2]. Many studies on LSPs are on the construction of glossaries and specialized dictionaries, dealing with three main stages: the lexical stage, the terminology for specialized glossaries; the morpho-syntactical stage; and the text-oriented stage, the study of specialized texts for both linguistics and extra-linguistic purposes.
Although there is a variety of definitions for LSPs, Kocourek [10, 21] finds that they all share a common basis, since all LSPs are characterized by the concept of variety, a communicative use, and a relation to a specific field of knowledge. Howev-
with the most popular among them being Special Language, Language for Specific Purposes [14] and Sublanguage [5, 9; 1, 22:17].
The difficulty of a clear distinction between an LSP and the General Language (GL) has been an issue for researchers [2, 71]. It is generally accepted that the GL and LSPs overlap, while the definition of an LSP is always in relation to the GL. Sager, Dungworth and McDonald [14, 17] note that the difference is actually on the degree that language characteristics of the GL appear in an LSP. Researchers point out the preference of the written form of LSPs and their synchronic rather than their diachronic status [10, 26-27]. The study of an LSP, even when carried out using traditional rather computerized means, is important for the construction and updating of specialized dictionaries, automatic specialized text processing and human or automatic translation.
An LSP minimizes emotion and maximizes the communication and taxonomic feature [14; 18]. The practical value of studying an LSP is manifest, as evidenced by its various applications. These mostly
relate to the teaching of the LSP, the construction of monolingual or multilingual specialized dictionaries for the best communication among experts, and the elimination of ambiguities and misinterpretations that result to translation errors. Moreover, the need for common terminology to allow for more efficient communication is made more imperative than ever, due to the advances of multiculturalism and multilin-gualism, especially in modern systemic contexts such as that ofthe European Union [16; 28; 20; 21; 24, 26].
2. Corpus-based Studies
Language studies mainly focus on language structure or language use. Traditional Linguistics emphasizes on structure. Currently, however, linguistics is interested on the real language use as well, and is focusing on what is happening rather than what should happen.
Corpus Linguistics (CL) is the area that has contributed much to the innovative approach of language study. The momentum (impetus) that the field has enjoyed in recent years has been achieved largely thanks to the adoption and advances of automatic procedures of analysis. However, the practice of searching words in their context dates back to the 13th century, when biblical scholars and their groups manually' composed the first concordance lists for content words of the Bible [11], without the use of automated technological tools. The advance of digital technology has fueled the growth of CL, since use of computers provides precise and complete analysis of corpora with speed, organizating on capabilities, and ease on data processing [1, 1].
A Corpus is a structured, statistically correct collection of texts, systematically designed for language analysis, and should be distinguished from the concepts File, Data and Collection of Texts [31, 61-62]. Corpus analysis consists of creation of the corpus, a large collection of real texts collected and structured following certain design criteria, and, subsequently, of the analysis which makes extensive use of computers for the processing and the quantitative and qualitative analysis. The most common products of corpus processing are the word and collocation frequency lists, the concordance tables, and the examples for the description of the phenomena revealed — which are not any more based on the intuition of the researcher [17].
The design criteria must ensure representativeness which depends on the sampling, the balance, the size of the individual texts and the body as a whole. A special language corpus is designed to give information about an LSP and, as such, it consists of LSP texts. As with a general language corpus, the larger the corpus, the more comprehensive the description of the LSP it represents tends to be [31, 73-74]. The representativeness, highly dependent on sampling when constructing a GL corpus, is also highly dependent on saturation in LSPs [3, 12, 18].
3.The Special Language of Greek Bank Contracts
It has been suggested that Law, as a field of research, aims to examine the problems created by socialization and the formation of human communities, through the scope of their regulation by rules set by an organized society [29, 33]. Banking law is composed of those rules that regulate banking practice by credit and financial institutions. Banking practices involve the establishment, organization and operation of credit and financial institutions as commercial corporate enterprises, the practice of all appropriate actions, and the supervision and control of companies and their operations. These form the "Law of the banking system" and the "Law of banking contracts" [32, 1].
Modern banking law is fluid and has undergone substantial change internationally, over the last decades. Because of its complexity and the increasing range ofbanking activities, its study and detailed exploration has therefore become a necessity. Law is generally characterized by dynamics dictated by its temporal, geographic, and systemic social context, which affect the legal system as a whole. In the Greek context, according to Rokas and Gortsos [30, 2], these dynamics depend on the formulation of rules for European banking law, as well as on technological evolution, the globalization of the economy, and the prevalence of the universal banking system.
The study of an LSP is of special interest for terminology, translation and language teaching [7]. The legal language seems to have morphosyntactic, semantic and stylistic traits that distinguish it from both the general and other LSPs. This clear distinction does not mean, however, neither tight separation from the GL nor internal coherence [23, 336].
Items of differentiation and internal consistency are apparent, i. e. routine expressions, technical terms, lexical archaisms as well as other elements that "give the impression of objectivity and distance between the transmitter and receiver" [4, 9].
The importance of legal language study stems from the purpose and the specific objectives it serves. According to Sadrini [15, 11], the use of legal language serves legal communication which, in turn, serves social factual situations within a legal system, and the legal consultation, debate and deliberation, both informally or academically (between lawyers, judges, legislators, academics etc.) and within the formal an institutional framework (comprised of the legislative, executive, and judicial branches).
Banking Contracts are basically legal documents between Banking Institutions and individuals that consolidate mutual obligations arising under specific agreements. Therefore, the language of such documents could be suggested to belong to the legal language in the broad sense. However, in addition to stricto sensu legal terms, banking contracts regularly, and to a certain degree, contain terms from the fields of finance and economics, as well as from areas such as public administration and sociology.
In the words of Trosborg and Jorgensen [19] "the world of business is rapidly changing into a smaller place, where individuals from different backgrounds and of different nationality develop common generic frames of reference for producing and understanding of communication of the market place". As business environments become more homogeneous, and global economy transcends national borders, detailed understanding of an LSP is of particular interest and importance [31]. Regarding the language of the Law, the globalization of the market and the economy gives rise to novel issues and relationships, especially between individuals and financial institutions, highlighting the dynamic feature of the relevant language.
Banking Law language in particular appears as especially dynamic, due to the constant and swift rise of new forms of banking products and, subsequently, types of relevant contracts. As a result, new terms, which are not listed in the specialized dictionaries, tend to emerge. This situation of constant evolution and fluidity makes the description and
analysis of this LSP a necessity. Within this context, the language of Bank Contracts is an LSP, differentiated not just in relation to the GL, but also in relation to other legal LSPs. However, until now, not much work has been done on the study of the Greek Bank Contract Language, which is restricted to Bounaki's study on the banking terminology in general [25].
4. The BanCo Corpus
The objective of any relevant study should be to completely describe the Banking Contracts LSP's distinct terms, with an aim to update the respective specialized dictionaries. As a first step, it is important to recognize and extract from the relevant texts the terms that characterize the LSP in question. The clarification of the language of banking contracts, especially through automatic tools, can be useful in avoiding ambiguity and misinterpretation of the contents of the contracts, and in contributing to their full understanding by both experts and non-experts.
The term 'Convention', in addition to the main text of contracts, refers to all documents that relate to a conventional practice that complements the main text of the contracts as such. Consequently, elements of such 'conventions' may include pre-contractual information, requests letters to the bank, additional contracts for various services to supplement or amend the main agreement, etc.
The BanCo Corpus consists of texts of the main convention contract and all kinds of documents that accompany it. The types of documents that were retrieved for the corpus came from:
a). bank websites of the four systemic Greek Banks, i. e. ALPHA BANK ( URL: http: www.al-pha.gr), EUROBANK (URL: http: www.eurobank. gr), NATIONAL BANK OF GREECE(URL: http: www.nbg.gr), PIRAEUS BANK(URL: http: www. piraeusbank.gr), b. authentic contracts that were provided to us by the above mentioned banks(The authors wish to thank all four Greek Banks for their contribution to this research).
The corpus is monolingual, consisting of conventions in the Greek language. Accessing authentic bank contracts was a rather hard task, since they include personal data, the protection of which had to be assured. It should be noted that not all banks provided the whole text of contracts requested. However, we need to stress that in each case we
formally committed that utter anonymity would be maintained regarding all parts of the contracts, for the duration of the full study.
Some of the contracts were provided to us in printed form, while others in electronic. Regarding those we acquired in printed form, they had to be scanned, turned into image files and converted into plain text files for compatibility with most automatic processing systems.
The BanCo Corpus includes various types of legal documents regarding contracts, i. e., requests, notifications, pre-contractual updates, etc. Legal texts can be generally classified into prescriptive and descriptive, [8] or into documents containing legislative provisions or other types of text having legal consequences (such as contracts), on the one hand, and theory texts, texts popularizing legal concepts and articles or newspapers where legal issues are discussed, on the other [13]. The BanCo Corpus only includes texts which have legal consequences and a contractual rather than a legislative or regulatory content. Therefore, they are characterized by stylistic elements not only of the legal language, but of their property to serve communication purposes as well. Such texts are mainly those relating to the advertising of banking products. Moreover, the use of economic and financial terms adds characteristics to the language of Bank Contracts that differentiate it from 'strict' legal language.
Metadata for the description of the corpus include information for each text regarding the text type, the bank, the source of the file, the size, the title and its brief description. Texts are categorized in seventeen (17) text types, i. e. application, application approval, notification, statement, bulletin, letter, contract annex, index, summary, proxy, corporate law act, complementary contract act, pre-contract notice, contract, contract supplement, attached letter, form of guarantee notice. Sixteen of the text types are in Greek language while the form of guarantee notice is in English.
Regarding the number of text for each text type, currently the corpus consists ofeighty nine (890 contracts, seventy five (75) pre-contract notices, nineteen (19) complementary contract acts, eight (8) application approvals, five (5) contract annexes, four (4) letters, three (3) statements, three (3) bulletins,
two (2) summaries, one (l) notification, one (l) index, one (l) proxy, one (l) corporate law act, one (l) contract supplement and one (l) form of guarantee notice. Currently, the dynamic corpus consists of 598,906 words, 598,345 of which are in Greek Language and 56l words of the form of guaranteed notice are in English. The size of the texts ranges from l09 to 23,357 words with an average text size of 2,773 words. One hundred and one (l0l) of the texts were obtained directly from the banks while one hundred and fifteen (ll5) were retrieved from the official bank web sites. Regarding the year of issue, one hundred and twenty (l20) of the texts were retrieved in 20l4 and one hundred and six (l06) in 20l5. Thirty seven (37) texts were obtained by the Alpha Bank, one hundred and fourty five (l45) from the National Bank of Greece, nineteen (l9) from the Piraeus Bank and fifteen texts (l5) from the Eurobank.
BanCo Corpus is a dynamic corpus, easily updated with new language material. BanCo Corpus is ready to be processed by off-the-self or do-it-yourself corpus processing tools for the extraction of Bank Contract LSP features.
5 .Conclusions and Future Work
The language of bank contracts is an LPS of the Banking Law. Due to the evolution of the field of bank contracts and the consequent need for specialized monolingual as well as multilingual dictionaries and semi/fully automatic translation systems, the exploration and detailed study of the language ofbank contract is a necessity. Nowadays, corpus-based studies give researchers the tools to study a language or an LSP in the most accurate and complete way and with incomparable speed when compared to traditional manual study. The BanCo Corpus, created for the exploration of the Greek Bank Contract Language, it has been proven sufficientlydynamic, since it is continuously updated as new language material is periodically acquired and added to it.
Besides the continuous updating of the BanCo Corpus, future work will focus on the language and stylistic characteristics of the Greek Bank Contract Language, extracted using corpus processing automatic and semi-automatic tools. The extracted features will be explored for similarities and differences to the general Banking Law Language.
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DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.20534/EJLPS-16-4-98-103
Ponomarev Oleg Vladimirovichj Fedorova Ekaterina Vitalevna, Protokovilova Anastasiia Andreevna, FEFU, School of Economics and Management, "Finance and credit", B1401F E-mail: o. [email protected]
Legal regulation of the market participant's work with securities
Abstract: In this article the current state of the market participants' work with securities is analyzed. Also it's main disadvantages and problems are identified. The ways of improving the legislation with the aim of increasing the efficiency of the market securities' operation and with the aim of risk reduction in its participants' activities are offered in this work.
