A top-secret game: metadiscourse analysis of the contractual discourse of purchasing 100 shares of the Suez Canal Company in 1947

Abstract

This paper examines categories and functions of interactive and interactional textual elements used in the contractual discourse of selling/purchasing 100 shares of the Suez Canal Company in 1947. The exchanged documents between the involved parties, the Egyptian (buyer) and the American (seller), are analyzed using Metadiscourse Analysis (MDA) as an approach to analyzing the textual resources used in the selected corpus. Game Theory is also used in conjunction with MDA to allocate the strategic behaviors of the players within the competitive contextual surroundings of the selected discourse. The analysis explains the structural constructions of the correspondences exploring how interactional relations between the participants are linguistically crafted. The analysis of the contract discourse is argued to contribute to econo-linguistics by examining how MDA and Game Theory can be integrated to construe/construct discourses about economics. The article concludes that metadiscourse resources enable the discourse of contracts to maintain a dialogic interactional language between the seller and the buyer. This interaction assimilates a game where the author and the reader (or players) exchange moves strategically to reach the target payoff. Thus, it can be argued that integrating MDA and Game Theory benefits econo-linguistics in highlighting hidden agendas and understanding interactive and interactional meanings in the discourse.

Keywords

• contract theory
• game theory
• econo-linguistics
• metadiscourse analysis
• strategic equilibrium