Corpus Analysis: Global Leaders’ Speech

Abstract

The importance of communication strategies for global CEOs has been recognized. It is believed that their effective messaging to stakeholders and society not only inspires employees but also impacts stock prices and business performance. However, previous research has primarily focused on qualitative studies, such as case studies and interviews. There have been few studies that collected large amounts of speech data from business leaders and analyzed it using reliable methods. This study employs corpus data analysis to examine the issues by analyzing a large amount of linguistic data from speeches of global business executives at the Oxford Union and TED Talks. Using the concordance software AntConc, a keyword analysis was conducted against representative large-scale English corpora to extract keywords frequently used by the global business leaders (p< 0.05). Similarly, a cluster analysis was performed on these characteristic words to investigate specifically how the communication strategies are constructed, how the audience is guided, and how persuasion is achieved. The results indicated that global business leaders effectively use significant communication strategies to achieve their goals.