THE IMPACT OF ECONOMIC PARADIGMS ON TEACHING BUSINESS ENGLISH

Abstract

The paper focuses on the impact of economic paradigms on teaching business English. We made up paradigmatic methods beginning from a number of common traits, which are prioritary in the meaning structure. Another distinctive traits are added to the above mentioned traits and the identification of these significant traits is needed for a proper definition, which is a very useful tool in the teaching process of the English business terms. The analysed material showed that there is not easy to make the economic paradigms. Thus, in most definitions for the economic terms, one can notice the conceptual interference with other economic terms. This aspect hinders the identification of common and distinctive traits. The identification of the difficulties to divide the selected economic terms in lexical-semantic paradigms has relevant variations (see ENTERPRISE, FIRM, COMPANY, CORPORATION or TITLE, BOND, SHARE). The semic analysis of the selected paradigms outlines the importance of the relation between the lexicographic and the terminographic definition to decode the specialised meaning. In many cases we noticed the lexicographic definitions are not clear, because they offer insufficient dates. For this reason, sometimes general dictionaries are not recommended in teaching economic terms because they are not updated or the definitions lack a lot of important details about economic terms. Nevertheless, we noticed that in other dictionaries (DEXI, NDU) the definitions for the ecomic terms are close to the terminographic definitions because they contain not only relevant economic details but also necessary information for the teaching process and the students’ further understanding. On the other hand, the lexicographic definitions, unlike the terminographic ones, indicate the polisemy of the economic terms , thus warning the non specialists on the risks of ambiguity. The analysis on texts is significant because it shows that not all the terms of a paradigm are updated similarly. In other cases, the updates in texts have a great dynamics which sporadically neutralises the distinctive traits in a paradigm.