Multi-word Expressions in German Annual Reports: A Diachronic Approach

Abstract

Corporations and stock exchanges are considered the "heart of capitalism" because they are responsible for the creation of inventions, new technologies, and entire industries in the past two centuries, and thus, through their actions, have significantly supported technological and social progress. Since the second half of the 19th century, German corporations have played the role of a pillar of the German economy and Germany has become one of the most economically developed European countries. Despite its economic importance, the German corporate language, as a segment of Business German (German: Wirtschaftsdeutsch), has not been significantly researched. This corpus linguistics paper presents the results of diachronic research of multi-word expressions in the annual reports of corporations from the three most important DAX Prime Standard indices, created by the German Stock Exchange (German: Deutsche Börse) from Frankfurt am Main – DAX, MDAX, and S-DAX. The subject of the linguistic analysis is the annual reports of 11 German corporations for the fiscal years 1997 and 2022. The results of the analysis show changes in the lexicon in the German corporate language over the past 25 years and can be a stimulus for further corpus research in that area. The results of the research can also have pedagogical implications because they can be used to create various types of lexical exercises in Business German classes, which contain the latest vocabulary from that field.