he lists below show those words found to occur with unusual INfrequency in the BEC. They have first been placed into a grammatical class (after lemmatisation) using Ljung’s (1990) categorisation. Like the positive keywords each group seemed to fall into a limited number of distinct semantic groups. Therefore, each word class has been further subdivided into semantic groupings. These were based on my intuition and another researcher may wish to re-categorise them. I have simply found this a simple way to help in the materials making process.
Grammatical Categorisation of BEC Negative Keywords
Semantic categorisation of BEC Negative Keyword Nouns
Semantic categorisation of BEC Negative Keyword Verbs
Semantic categorisation of BEC Negative Keyword Adjectives
Semantic categorisation of BEC Negative Keyword Noun/Verbs
The negative keywords are important as they give us an insight into what Business English is not. When placing the positive keywords and the negative together we can start to get a picture of what the world of business lexis is like. Have a look below for an overview.
Business English 