SYNTACTICAL PECULIARITIES OF US PATENT SPECIFICATION

Abstract

The article deals with the study of the syntax of such a unique document as a patent. Due to its dual character, it is, on the one hand, a legal document that protects the rights of the patent owner, and on the other hand, a technical text containing present state of knowledge in a particular field of science and technology, so in this paper the patent specification is considered at the intersection of scientific and technical style and official style. In this exploration the syntactic features of patents of the US metal industry were analyzed. It is determined that the genre character of the patent affects its syntactical organization. It was found that under the influence of the scientific style, which is characterized by an impersonal manner of presentation of the material, in the US patent specifications there is a significant number of sentences with a nominal predicate, which indicates in favor of the nominative language of patents. In order to expand the description of known technical solutions, impersonal constructions with the formal subject “it” are widely used. The results of the study concluded that the syntax of patent specifications of the US metal industry has undergone significant changes in recent years, due to both extralinguistic (patent reform and integration processes) and itralinguistic (simplification and compression of language) factors. Being at the intersection of scientific-technical and official styles, the language of patent specifications is influenced by them, which is manifested in reducing the number of complex sentences and increasing the amount of information while reducing the volume of text, as well as deviating from the “first person” grammatical construction at the beginning of the claim. The accuracy and conciseness of the statement is achieved by simple sentences, which are complicated by impersonal forms: complexes with the participle, the infinitive and the gerund. The syntactical characteristics of the patent include a consistent statement of interrelated facts, which is achieved through the use of complex sentences with conjunctions (often attributive, conditional and cause), parenthetical words and means of formal and semantic cohesion. A promising area of further research may be the study of syntactic features of other technology branches in order to identify their general regularities and differences.