Corpus Analysis of Business English

Abstract

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.