Corpus Analysis of Business English

Business English, also referred to as international business English or business English as a lingua franca, pertains to spoken and written language used in commercial, transactional, and often for‐profit workplace contexts. It encompasses a wide variety of registers, such as letters, memos, e‐mails, text messages or SMSs, print and broadcast news, multimodal presentations, conference calls, workplace interactions, social media and Internet‐based texts, reports, prospectuses, white papers, and responses to customer‐initiated correspondence or phone calls. Nearly 90% of all international business proceedings and e‐commerce transactions are now conducted in English, and the number of high‐profile, multinational corporations that have adopted English‐only policies for important business communications continues to increase. This entry focuses on the applications of corpus linguistic (CL) approaches in the linguistic analysis of business English. It provides a summary of several well‐known corpora of business English across written and spoken registers and discusses results of related analyses. Expanding research in oral or spoken business discourse in CL is highlighted, together with a sample study of business English in telephone‐based interactions using corpus‐based multidimensional analysis (MDA). The MDA framework was developed by Douglas Biber in establishing the statistical co‐occurrence of part‐of‐speech‐tagged linguistic features from corpora. The concept of linguistic co‐occurrence, which is the foundation of MDA, can be introduced by pointing out intuitively the common differences (or similarities) in the linguistic composition of various types of spoken or written business registers.

Business correspondence · Business English · English as a lingua franca · International business · Lingua franca · Linguistics · Political science · Computer Science · Discourse Analysis in Language Studies · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies · linguistics and terminology studies

• Corpus Analysis of Business English

  Open Access•Bettina Fischer‐Starcke•Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics•2012

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• Dimensions of Register Variation

  Open Access•Douglas Biber•Dimensions of Register Variation•1995

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• Variation across Speech and Writing

  Open Access•Douglas Biber•Variation Across Speech and Writing•1988

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• The Handbook of Business Discourse

  Francesca Bargiela-Chiappini, Francesca Bargiela‐chiappini•Handbook of Business Discourse•2009

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• Language Taught for Meetings and Language Used in Meetings

  Mark Williams•Applied Linguistics•1988

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• Talking at Work

  Open Access•Shelley Staple, Lucy Pickering et al.•Talking at Work•2016

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• The Academic Word List 10 Years On

  Open Access•Averil Coxhead•TESOL Quarterly•2011

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• Linguistic characteristics of AAC discourse in the workplace

  Open Access•Eric Friginal, Pamela Pearson et al.•Discourse Studies•2013

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