A Break-down of the Business English Corpus

The corpus was created on the principle of noting the difference between text types used for doing business and those for ‘talking about’ business. This is reflected in the categorisations below.

WRITING ABOUT BUSINESS

PART OF CORPUS	TOKENS	CONTENTS
BUSINESS BOOKS	53,470	5 extracts from different books(approx. 10,000 words each)^[1]
BUSINESS NEWSPAPERS	64,291	121 articles
BUSINESS JOURNALS & MAGAZINES	78,846	52 articles
TOTAL	196, 607

WRITING TO DO BUSINESS

PART OF CORPUS	TOKENS	CONTENTS
ANNUAL REPORTS	34,537	3 annual reports
BUS PRESS RELEASES	21,656	29 business press releases
BUSINESS CONTRACTS	29, 602	13 contracts/agreements
BUSINESS FAXES	23,105	114 faxes
BUSINESS LETTERS	26,793	94 letters
BUSINESS REPORTS	62,908	17 reports
COMPANY BROCHURES	23,239	13 company brochures
EMAILS	28,857	202 emails
JOB ADVERTISEMENTS	22,293	87 job advertisements
MANUALS	21,160	5 manuals
MEMOS	12,542	47 memos
MINUTES	34,805	15 sets of minutes
PRODUCT BROCHURES	26,175	19 product brochures
QUOTATIONS	8,997	21 quotations
MISCELLANEOUS	2,427	OHT, job description & agendas
TOTAL	379, 096

TALKING ABOUT BUSINESS

PART OF CORPUS	TOKENS	CONTENTS
INTERVIEWS	70,894	24 interviews
BUSINESS ON RADIO & TV	148,983	72 broadcasts
TOTAL	219, 877

SPEAKING TO DO BUSINESS

PART OF CORPUS	TOKENS	CONTENTS
JOB INTERVIEWS:3 JOB INTERVIEWS3 JOB ASSESSMENT INTERVIEWS	17,447	6 interviews
MEETINGS: 4 MEETINGS5 MEETINGS1 MEETING4 MEETINGS1 MEETING TOTAL WORDS:	126, 243	15 MEETINGS technicalfinancialorientation/planningsales and marketingpresentation of new products
NEGOTIATING	16, 450	4 negotiation sessions
TELEPHONE CALLS	30, 414	89 phone conversations
SPEECHES/PRESENTATIONS	19,020	5 speeches
TRAINING SESSION	17, 867	1 session of technical training
TOTAL	227,441