This thesis addresses two fundamental issues regarding lexis in the Business English environment. It firstly asks whether the lexis of Business English is significantly different from that of ‘everyday’ general English, and secondly, if the lexis found in Business English published materials is significantly different from that found in real-life business. In order to test these hypotheses two corpora were created to form the basis of the analysis: the Published Materials Corpus (PMC) consisting of 33 published Business English course and resource books at 590,000 running words and the Business English Corpus (BEC) at, 1,023,000 running words divided between spoken (44%) and written (56%) texts. The BNC Sampler corpus was used as reference corpus. These three corpora were then able to be lexically compared by using WordSmith 3 (Scott 1999) using statistically-based key words. The results of these analyses showed that it was possible to define the world of business lexis, and also how it was lexically separated from general English by placing the words into a limited group of semantic categories. These categories were found to recur across word class boundaries and showed a lexical world of business bounded by its people, institutions, activities, events and entities, The boundary limits of business lexis were placed by the non-business lexis of the negative key words and the semantic groups they formed. Representative words from each of the main semantic groups were chosen for further study to see how they behaved both semantically and grammatically. Louw’s (1993) concept of semantic prosody was used to determine how Business English words associated with certain semantic groups, and Firth’s (1957) and Hoey’s (1997) idea of colligation was used to show which grammatical patterns the words typically formed themselves into. Results of these secondary analyses of the BEC showed that whilst some business lexis associates with semantic groups unique to itself, most lexis is formed into patterns of interrelated semantic groups which regularly co-occur with each other. Additionally, there was evidence to suggest that words form associations to some semantic groups when in the business environment, and others when out of it. In the business setting, the meaning potential of words was found to be reduced and this had consequences both semantically and grammatically. Fewer meanings were used than in general English – and, as grammatical patterning and meaning were found to be co-dependent, restricted meaning led to area-specific and restricted grammatical patterning. The same analytical methods were used in the analysis of the PMC and it was compared both to the BNC, to see how published materials differ from general English, and to the BEC, to see how two corpora, both purporting to be Business English, differed from each other. Where the BEC could be seen to show a limited and specialist lexis, the PMC was even more limited. The lexical world of business presented by the materials showed a stress on personal and interpersonal contact, and a focus on a limited number of business activities, notably entertaining, travel, meetings and presentations. There was less reference to states and qualities, and the lexis in the PMC concentrated even more than the BEC on tangible, concrete items.

No portion of the work referred to in this thesis has been submitted in support of an application for another degree or qualification of this or any other university.

Table of Contents

			Page

	Acknowledgements		22

	Chapter 1	Summary of the Research	25

	Chapter 2	Statement of the Problem and Overview	29
	2.1	Introduction	29
	2.1	The hypotheses and research questions	30
	2.3	Method	30
	2.4	Methodological overview	33
	2.5	Aims of the research	33
	2.6	Overview of the thesis	34
	2.7	Concrete problems – concrete answers	35

	Chapter 3	A Review of the Literature of Business English	37
	3.1	Introduction and overview	37
	3.2	The development of ESP	38
	3.2.1	The origins of ESP until 1945	38
	3.2.2	Post-war ESP	39
	3.2.3	Stage 1: Register Analysis	41
	3.2.4	Later developments in Register Analysis	43
	3.2.5	Stage 2: Discourse or Rhetorical Analysis	43
	3.2.6	Later developments in Discourse Analysis: Genre Analysis	44
	3.2.7	Stage 3: Needs Analysis	45
	3.2.8	Later developments in Needs Analysis	47
	3.2.9	Stage 4: Skills and strategies	48
	3.2.10	Stage 5: The Learning-Centred approach	49
	3.2.11	Stage 6: ESP today	50
	3.2.12	Summary: definitions of ESP	51
	3.3	Business English in an ESP context	54

	A: Studies into What Business Language is		58
			58
	3.4	Pickett and beyond	58
	3.4.1	Introduction: initial comments on the nature of Business English	58
	3.4.2	Pickett and the ‘poetics’ of the business ‘ergolect’	61
	3.4.3	Pickett: a summary	67
	3.5	Pickett’s Concept 1: Poetics and the nature of ‘technical’ language	69
	3.5.1	The notions of sub-technical language and layering outside the field of Business English	70
	3.5.2	The notion of layering in the field of Business English	73
	3.5.3	Discussion	76
	3.6	Pickett’s Concept 2: The ‘Gamut’ – the ergolect of business	80
	3.6.1	Discourse	81
	3.6.1.1	Cohesion	82
	3.6.1.2	Strategies	83
	3.6.2	Culture	86
	3.6.3	Corporate culture, power and language	91
	3.6.3.1	Corporate culture	92
	3.6.4	Power	94
	3.6.5	Genre: a brief overview	97
	3.6.5.1	Business English genres	99
	3.6.5.2	Moves, steps and cycles	100
	3.6.5.3	Extra-linguistic aspects of genre study	102
	3.6.6	Discussion: approaches to researching the ‘gamut’ – discourse and genre	103
	3.6.6.1	Discourse	104
	3.6.6.2	Genre	108
	3.6.6.3	Discussion	113
	3.7	Pickett’s Concept 3: Business communication – needs analysis and Business English	114
	3.7.1	Needs analysis and Business English: who communicates with who?	116
	3.7.2	Problems with needs analysis approaches	117
	3.7.3	Language and needs analysis	118
	3.7.4	Perceptions and intuition	119
	3.7.5	An attempt to overcome the question of language in needs analysis	121
	3.7.6	An attempt to overcome the question of intuition in needs analysis	121
	3.7.7.	Language and needs surveys	122
	3.7.8	Discussion	123

	B: What Business English is thought to be		125

	3.8.	Business English materials	125
	3.8.1	General or special English?	125
	3.8.1.1	Discussion	129
	3.8.2	Categorising Business English materials	130
	3.8.3	Analysis of the validity of Business English materials in relation to intuition	134
	3.8.4	Studies of intuition outside Business English	136
	3.8.5	Studies of intuition in Business English	139
	3.8.6	Discussion	142
	3.9	The review of the literature: summary and conclusions	143
	3.9.1	Macro- vs micro-level knowledge	144
	3.9.2	Single vs multi-disciplinary knowledge	145
	3.9.3	Intuitive vs empirical knowledge	146
	3.9.4	Research knowledge vs classroom practice	146
	3.10	Afterword: towards a methodology	147

	Chapter 4	Lexis: From Collocation to Colligation	149
	4.1	Introduction	149
	4.2	Vocabulary and pedagogy: a brief history	150
	4.2.1	The 1950s to the present day	154
	4.3	Collocation	155
	4.3.1	A preliminary definition of collocation	155
	4.3.1.1	Syntagmatic/paradigmatic relations	157
	4.3.1.2	Reciprocal/non-reciprocal collocation	157
	4.3.2	Development of the concept of collocation	158
	4.3.3	Key elements of collocation	163
	4.3.3.1	The notion of upward and downward collocation	164
	4.3.3.2	The strength of collocations	165
	4.3.3.3	The notion of collocational span – what makes a collocation?	167
	4.3.3.4	Collocation as an embodiment of the ‘idiom principle’	169
	4.3.3.5	Collocation, the idiom principle and Business English	170
	4.3.3.6	Collocation and beyond	174
	4.4	Semantic prosody	174
	4.5	Colligation	179
	4.5.1	Technical aspects of colligation	179
	4.5.2	Pedagogy and colligation	180
	4.6	A final view of collocation, colligation and semantic prosody	181
	4.7	Multi-word items, prefabrication and the lexical approach	183
	4.7.1	Introduction	183
	4.7.2	What are multi-word items?	184
	4.7.3	Gambits	185
	4.7.4	Other definitions of MWIs	186
	4.7.5	Discussion	195
	4.7.6	Characteristics of MWIs: making sense of the definitions	197
	4.7.6.1	Fixed and non-fixed: points on a continuum	198
	4.7.6.2	The relationship of form and function	200
	4.7.6.3	Competence, performance, the idiom principle and multi-word items	202
	4.8	The lexical approach	204
	4.9	Multi-word items in this thesis	209
	4.10	The next chapter	211

	Chapter 5	The Methodological Background: British Traditions of Text Analysis, Correlative Register Analysis and Corpus Linguistics	212
	5.1	Introduction	212
	5.2	British traditions in text analysis: Firth, Halliday and Sinclair	213
	5.2.1	Principle 1: Linguistics is essentially a social science and an applied science	213
	5.2.2	Principle 2: Language should be studied in actual, attested, authentic instances of use, not as intuitive, invented, isolated sentences	214
	5.2.3	Principle 3: The unit of study must be whole texts	215
	5.2.4	Principle 4: Texts and text types must be studied comparatively across text corpora	217
	5.2.5	Principle 5: Linguistics is concerned with the study of meaning: form and meaning are inseparable	218
	5.2.6	Principle 6: There is no boundary between lexis and grammar: lexis and grammar are independent	219
	5.2.7	Principle 7: Much language use is routine	220
	5.2.8	Principle 8: Language in use transmits the culture	220
	5.2.9	Principle 9: Saussurian dualisms are misconceived	221
	5.3	Corpus linguistics	222
	5.3.1	Corpora: a brief history	222
	5.3.2	Why use corpora?	225
	5.3.3	Corpora: for and against	225
	5.3.4	Reasons for the use of corpora in linguistic analysis	226
	5.3.5	Some problems with the use of corpora for linguistic analysis	229
	5.3.6	Corpora use in this study	233
	5.4	The next chapter	234

Chapter 6	Creating the Corpora	235
	6.1	Introduction	235
	6.2	Corpus size	235
	6.2.1	The size of the Business English Corpus	238
	6.2.2	The size of the Published Materials Corpus	239
	6.3	Sampling, representativeness and balance in the BEC	240
	6.3.1	Introduction	240
	6.3.2	Sampling	241
	6.3.2.1	The population	242
	6.3.2.2	Extra linguistic factors in relation to the population	243
	6.3.2.3	Specification of macro-genres for the samples	245
	6.3.2.4	Sample size and make-up	247
	6.3.3	Balance and representativenes in the BEC	249
	6.4	Sampling, balance and representativeness in the PMC	254
	6.5	Data collection and entry	259
	6.5.1	Data collection for the BEC	259
	6.5.1.1	Publicly available data	260
	6.5.1.2	Private data	260
	6.5.2	Data collection for the PMC	262
	6.5.3	Methods of data entry in the BEC	262
	6.5.3.1	Adaption of material already in electronic form	262
	6.5.3.2	Conversion by optical scanning	263
	6.5.3.3	Conversion by keyboarding	263
	6.5.4	Data entry in the PMC	265
	6.5.5	Transcription	265
	6.5.5.1	Spoken language transcription	266
	6.6	Data storage and retrieval	269
	6.7	Confidentiality, copyright and ethics	270
	6.8	The reference corpus	272
	6.9	Discussion and rationale	272

Chapter 7	Hypotheses, Research Questions and Method	274
	7.1	Introduction	274
	7.2	Hypothesis One	274
	7.3	Hypothesis Two	284
	7.4	The next chapter	288

Chapter 8	Overview of results	289
	8.1	Introduction	289
	8.2	Analysis of the BEC	289
	8.2.1	General statistics of the BEC	289
	8.2.2	BEC frequency list unlemmatised/unedited	290
	8.2.3	BEC frequency list (lemmatised)	290
	8.2.4	BEC Key words	293
	8.2.5	Grammatical categorisation of BEC positive key words	298
	8.2.6	Semantic categorisation of BEC positive key words	298
	8.2.7	Grammatical categorisation of BEC negative key words	298
	8.2.8	Semantic categorisation of BEC negative key words	299
	8.2.9	Analysis of 50 key words from the BEC	299
	8.2.10	BEC 3-6 word cluster frequency lists	311
	8.2.11	Key BEC 3-word clusters	317
	8.2.12	Analysis of five key 2-word clusters from the BEC	319
	8.2.13	Analysis of five 3-word clusters from the BEC	322
	8.2.14	BEC Key key-word database	325
	8.2.15	Analysis of five key words from the BNC corpus	327
	8.2.16	Collocates of the 50 key words shown by MI statistic	330
	8.3	Analysis of the PMC	334
	8.3.1	PMC general statistics	334
	8.3.2	PMC frequency list unlemmatised	334
	8.3.3	PMC frequency list lemmatised	335
	8.3.4	PMC positive key words (BNC reference corpus)	335
	8.3.5	PMC positive key words (BEC reference corpus)	337
	8.3.6	Grammatical categorisation of PMC positive key words (BNC reference)	340
	8.3.7	Semantic categorisation of PMC positive key words (BNC reference)	340
	8.3.8	Grammatical categorisation of PMC positive key words (BEC reference)	340
	8.3.9	Semantic categorisation of PMC positive key words (BEC reference)	340
	8.3.10	Analysis of five key words from the PMC	341
	8.3.11	PMC 3-word cluster frequency list	346
	8.3.12	PMC key 3-word clusters ( BEC reference)	347
	8.3.13	PMC Key key-word database	348
	8.4	The next chapter	350

	Chapter 9	Results and Discussion	351
	9.1	Introduction	351
	9.2	Hypotheses and questions	351
	9.2.1	Research questions relating to Business English lexis	352
	9.3	Linguistic features of Business English lexis	354
	9.3.1	Is there such as thing as Business English lexis?	354
	9.3.1.1	Key words	355
	9.3.1.2	Positive key words in the BEC	357
	9.3.2	If there is such a thing as Business English lexis what is it made up of?	360
	9.3.2.1	Positive key word analysis	361
	9.3.2.2	Negative key word analysis	375
	9.3.2.3	Key words and the ‘world of business’	384
	9.3.2.4	The next section	387
	9.3.3	Can the concept of semantic prosody be found in Business English?	387
	9.3.3.1	Analysis of business lexis by semantic prosody	388
	9.3.3.2	Semantic prosody: conclusions	406
	9.3.4	What colligational and grammar/meaning patterns can be found in Business English?	411
	9.3.4.1	Colligation and grammatical form/meaning relations in Business English	415
	9.3.4.2	Discussion: business-specific grammatical patterning?	434
	9.3.4.3	Sub-technical language and Pickett – a footnote	437
	9.3.5	How are words distributed across Business English macro-genres?	440
	9.3.5.1	Overall range of Business English lexis across macro-genres	442
	9.3.5.2	Doing vs about and spoken vs written Business English lexis	444
	9.3.6	What kind of clusters can be found in Business English	447
	9.3.6.1	Lexical clusters in the BEC at the macro-level	448
	9.3.6.2	Lexical clusters in the BEC at the micro-level: analysis of individual 2-3 word clusters	452
	9.3.7	How do words associate with each other in Business English?	460
	9.3.8	Business English: a summary	465
	9.4	Business English published materials	471
	9.4.1	How do the PMC key words define the lexical world of business and how does this definition compare to that shown in the BEC?	474
	9.4.1.1	Analysis 1: Key word analysis of the PMC (BNC reference corpus)	474
	9.4.1.2	Discussion: results of Analysis 1	488
	9.4.1.3	Analysis 2: Key word analysis of the PMC (BEC reference corpus)	490
	9.4.1.4	Discussion: results of Analysis 1 and Analysis 2	502
	9.4.2	Further analysis – PMC negative key words	504
	9.4.3	Semantic prosody in the PMC	505
	9.4.3.1	Discussion	511
	9.4.4	Colligation and grammar/meaning combinations in the PMC	512
	9.4.5	Word clusters in the PMC	517
	9.4.5.1	Clusters at a macro-level in the PMC	518
	9.4.5.2	Clusters at a micro-level in the PMC	521
	9.4.6	The PMC: conclusions	522
	9.4.6.1	The next section	525
	9.5	Pedagogical Issues	526
	9.5.1	Materials creation should be corpus-based	527
	9.5.2	Business English materials should contain Business English	529
	9.5.3	Sub-business language needs to be stressed	533
	9.5.4	Semantic prosody needs to be made widely known and explicitly taught	535
	9.5.5	Lexis should be seen in its typical grammatical setting	540
	9.5.6	Students should know that words are not evenly distributed	543
	9.5.7	There should be a greater focus on word clusters	545
	9.5.8	Associate words should be more recognised	548
	9.5.9	Pedagogical issues: a conclusion	550
	9.6	Incidental findings	552
	9.7	Critique and future applications of the corpora	561
	9.7.1	Critique	561
	9.7.2	Further applications	565

	Chapter 10	Summary of Conclusions	567
	10.1	The lexis of Business English	567
	10.2	The lexis of published Business English materials	570
	10.3	A final word	572

	PMC Bibliography		573

	Bibliography		575

List of Tables

Table Number	Table	Page

I	A definition of ESP: absolute and variable factors	53
II	The layering of business lexis	66
III	Examples of discourse/genre studies in relation to the size of the data gathered and the transfer of results to the classroom	106
IV	Types of lexical phrases defined by Nattinger & DeCarrico	190
V	Summary of categories of multi-word items	195
VI	Different terminology used for same MWI phenomena	197
VII	Formulaic language as defined by Howarth (1998)	199
VIII	Reasons for using corpora for linguistic analysis	229
IX	Business English Corpus ideal content specification	246
X	The Business English Corpus	252
XI	Business English books included in the PMC	256
XII	Data gained via personal contacts	261
XIII	Data gained via the Chamber of Commerce	262
XIV	Mode of text entry in the BEC	264
XV	General statistics of the BEC	289
XVI	BEC lemmatised frequency list (top 100 lemmas)	291
XVII	BEC positive key words (top 100)	293
XVIII	BEC negative key words (top 100)	296
XIX	6-word frequency clusters	312
XX	5-word frequency clusters	313
XXI	4-word frequency clusters	315
XXII	3-word frequency clusters	316
XXIII	Key BEC 3-word clusters	317
XXIV	BEC key key-words (top 100)	325
XXV	Collocates of the key words and MI score	331
XXVI	General statistics of the PMC	334
XXVII	PMC positive key words (top 100) – BNC reference	335
XXVIII	PMC positive key words (top 100) – BEC reference	338
XXIX	PMC 3-word cluster frequency list	346
XXX	PMC key 3-word clusters – BEC reference	347
XXXI	PMC key key-words (top 50) – BEC reference	349
XXXII	Business-related words found in the top 100 most frequent words in the lemmatised BEC	355
XXXIII	Top 100 BEC Positive Key Word List – business-related words only	357
XXXIV	Differences in the top 100 frequency/key word lists of the BEC	359
XXXV	Positive key words grammatical categorisation	362
XXXVI	Semantic categorisation of positive key verbs in the BEC	367
XXXVII	Negative key words grammatical categorisation	376
XXXVIII	Semantic categorisation of negative key verbs in the BEC	380
XXXIX	Semantic categorisation of negative key adjectives in the BEC	382
XXXX	Business lexis vs non-business lexis: positive and negative key words	386
XXXXI	Left of node word semantic prosodic analysis of the word customer	390
XXXXII	People in business: table of semantic prosodic relations	394
XXXXIII	Business activities: table of semantic prosodic relations	395
XXXXIV	Business actions: table of semantic prosodic relations	397
XXXXV	Business descriptions: table of semantic prosodic relations	400
XXXXVI	Comparative prosodies of global and international	402
XXXXVII	Business events and entities: table of semantic prosodic relations	404
XXXXVIII	Percentage of coverage by semantic prosody	408
XXXXIX	Comparative occurrence of semantic prosody BEC/BNC	409
L	Examples of noun/verb phrases and compound adjectives related to people in business	415
LI	Business-specific usage of words related to people in business	418
LII	Business-specific usage of words related to business activities	421
LIII	Business-specific usage of words related to business actions	425
LIV	Business-specific usage of words related to business descriptions	428
LV	Business-specific usage of words related to business events and entities	431
LVI	Key words computed from Meeting 2 in the BEC	437
LVII	Division of key words into three categories of lexis	439
LVIII	Macro-generic distribution of Business English lexis	443
LIX	Placement of the 50 words along the spoken/written and doing/about continua	445
LX	Colligational differences between a lot of and the end of	458
LXI	Placement of the 2- and 3 word clusters along the spoken/written and doing/about continua	459
LXII	Associates of the top ten key key-words in the BEC	462
LXIII	Associative patterning between the top ten key key-words in the BEC	463
LXIV	The 100 most ‘key’ key words of the PMC (BNC reference corpus)	475
LXV	Semantic categorisation of PMC key word verbs	483
LXVI	Noun/verb PMC-BEC differences	488
LXVII	The 100 most ‘key’ key words of the PMC (BEC reference corpus)	491
LXVIII	PMC positive key verbs (BEC reference)	498
LXIX	BEC negative key verbs	499
LXX	PMC positive key adjectives (BEC reference)	500
LXXI	PMC positive key noun/verbs (BEC reference)	501
LXXII	Differences between key words found in the PMC and BEC	503
LXXIII	Semantic prosodies of manager in the BEC and PMC	506
LXXIV	Semantic prosodies of customer in the BEC and PMC	507
LXXV	Semantic prosodies of product in the BEC and PMC	508
LXXVI	Semantic prosodies of market in the BEC and PMC	509
LXXVII	Semantic prosodies of business in the BEC and PMC	510
LXXVIII	Differences between semantic prosody in the PMC and BEC	511
LXXIX	Comparison of five words PMC/BEC	514
LXXX	The most frequent 3-word clusters BEC and PMC	522
LXXXI	Summary of the lexical world of business	530
LXXXII	Examples of the relative frequency of male-female lexis in the BEC	552
LXXXIII	The sliding scale of use of swearing: PMC ->BEC ->BNC	553

List of Figures

Figure Number	Figure	Page

Fig. 1	The development of ESP as found in the literature	42
Fig. 2	A time-line of approaches to ESP	51
Fig. 3	Conflict of ESP conceptions	53
Fig. 4	The division in SP-LT – Strevens (1977)	55
Fig. 5	The division of ESP – Jordan (1989)	55
Fig. 6	The division of EAP – Jordan (1989)	55
Fig. 7	EBP divided into EGBP and ESBP	56
Fig. 8	Business English in ESP and Business English learners	57
Fig. 9	Business English as seen by Brieger (1997)	59
Fig. 10	The specialised language of particular businesses	63
Fig. 11	A summary of Pickett’s main ideas	68
Fig. 12	Similarities and differences in BPAs and BNPs	74
Fig. 13	Problems related to NNS discourse patterns	85
Fig. 14	A model of cross- and inter-cultural discourse	91
Fig. 15	Spoken genres in Business English as identified by Tompos (1999)	99
Fig. 16	Generic structure of corporate meetings	102
Fig. 17	Factors involved in the discussion of Business English	124
Fig. 18	Business English categories of materials	132
Fig. 19	Syntagmatic/paradigmatic relationships	157
Fig. 20	Kjellmer’s (1990) ideas on collocational fixedness	165
Fig. 21	A sliding scale of collocability	166
Fig. 22	Gender division in the BEC by percentage of words	253
Fig. 23	UK/US language in the BEC shown by percentage of words	254
Fig. 24	The Spoken/Written and Doing/About divisions in the BEC shown by percentage	254
Fig. 25	The PMC divided into 70% resource books (23 books) and 30% course books (10 books)	258
Fig. 26	Resource books in the PMC	258
Fig. 27	Gender distribution of authors of books in the PMC	258
Fig. 28	Books devoted to speaking, writing or general skills in the PMC	259
Fig. 29	An example from the BEC database	270
Fig. 30	Key words analysed in the thesis shown by semantic category	280
Fig. 31	The process by which Business English key words were arrived at	357
Fig. 32	The relationship of Business English key words and general English	360
Fig. 33	Semantic noun categories of BEC key words	362
Fig. 34	Relationship of business to delexicalised verbs in the 100 most frequent words of the BEC	369
Fig. 35	Semantic noun/verb categories of BEC key words	371
Fig. 36	The sliding scale of business-related key noun/verbs in the BEC	372
Fig. 37	The main semantic groups that go to form key Business English lexis	374
Fig. 38	Semantic noun categories of BEC negative key words	376
Fig. 39	People featured in positive and negative key words	377
Fig. 40	Places featured in positive and negative key words	379
Fig. 41	The sliding scale of key word adjectives	383
Fig. 42	Semantic noun/verb categories of BEC negative key words	383
Fig. 43	The axes that delineate Business English lexis	387
Fig. 44	Semantic prosody for distribution	396
Fig. 45	The most frequent semantic sets collocating with business lexis	407
Fig. 46	Dispersion plot for customer	441
Fig. 47	Macro-generic distribution of the 50 words taken for analysis	443
Fig. 48	Semantic prosodic sets for 2-word clusters	453
Fig. 49	Semantic prosodic sets for 3-word clusters	456
Fig. 50	Levels of lexical connection in the Business English environment	460
Fig. 51	Associates of company and sales	464
Fig. 52	Semantic groups commonly associating with business lexis	467
Fig. 53	Business English lexis: ever-expanding segments that form part of the whole	471
Fig. 54	The two-way process of key word analysis of PMC lexis	473
Fig. 55	Distribution of key words by word class in the PMC (BNC reference)	477
Fig. 56	Semantic categorisation of positive key nouns PMC -> BNC	478
Fig. 57	The lexical world of Business English as found in the PMC (BNC reference corpus)	488
Fig. 58	Distribution of key words by word class in the PMC (BEC reference)	493
Fig. 59	Semantic categorisation of PMC key word nouns (BEC reference)	494
Fig. 60	The business world found in the key nouns of Business English teaching materials	498
Fig. 61	Most frequent 3-word clusters – PMC and BEC	518
Fig. 62	PMC key 3-word clusters – BNC and BEC reference	518
Fig. 63	A lexical map of Business English for students	531
Fig. 64	Example 6- and 7-word clusters from the BEC	546

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The Author

Mike Nelson, BA (Hons) Communication Studies, M.Ed TESOL, has lived and worked in Turku, Finland since 1983. Originally teaching young learners, Mike moved on to teach in the medical faculty of the local university hospital and subsequently to the private sector, where he has been teaching Business English since 1990. He has been Director of Studies at Kielikanava Language Centre since 1991. Mike’s research interests have been needs analysis, materials development and Business English. These factors were combined in 1994 when he published the Business English Course Generator – a computerised system for Business English needs analysis. In 1997, together with Richard West of Manchester University, Mike produced a computerised needs analysis and placement testing system for Oxford University Press to operate in a World Wide Web environment. Most recently, he has written a distance learning module – Teaching Business English – for M.Ed students at Manchester University. Mike is married with two – soon to be three – children.