Research On Singapore Business English

Due to the economic globalization, the business and trade contacts with countries are growing increasingly tense. English, as a universal language in the world, widely used in the various business activities, is playing an important part in international communication (Crystal,2003:4). In this case, focus upon Business English has been on the rise. English has been widely accepted as a common language or lingua franca in China-ASEAN since the establishment of China-ASEAN Free Trade Area. It is generally conceived that Singapore English is one of the Englishes in the world and a lot of work has been done in the research of this language variety. However, it is not difficult to find out that almost all of the studies on Singapore English have been on the features of Singapore colloquial English or informal internet English such as English in chat room. The research on Singapore written English is relatively rare. No substantial research on Singapore formal written Business English has been found. What are the features of Singapore formal Business English? Does Singapore formal Business English carry any features that have been found in Singapore colloquial English? The present thesis makes an attempt to answer these two questions.Business English is the English used in business situations and is often referred to as ESP (English for special purpose). Business is also divided two categories, namely, general Business English and special Business English. General Business English is generic concept, while special Business English, in contrast, refers to Business English used in specific business situations such as English for business law, English for accounting and English for logistics. In this thesis, my focus is on general Business English. To explore the features of Singapore general Business English, I selected randomly the materials from Singapore seminal newspaper-The Business Times2011and compiled a mini corpus of one million words. The mini corpus is called Singapore Business English Corpus (referred to as SBEC hereafter).Meanwhile, in order to highlight the features of Singapore Business English, Brown Corpus is employed as a reference corpus, since Brown corpus was scientifically compiled and has been well known for its representativeness of modern American English. Therefore, the features of Singapore Business English under discussion in thesis, to a larger extent, are confined to the characteristics which are in contrast with that in Brown Corpus. Text Lex Compare and Wordsmith are utilized to retrieve the relevant language items.The features at both lexical and syntactic levels are meticulously examined and the following conclusions are tentatively drawn:1) In contrast with Brown Corpus, SBEC manifests its features at both lexical and syntactic levels;2) Singapore Business English features the unique words that are characterized with business behaviors;3) SBEC is not so unique in that SBEC and Brown Corpus share a large amount of words. This implies that Singapore Business English and general English are largely overlapped;4) Singapore Business English enjoys some high frequency words that are related to business environment;5) Singapore Business English has distinct collocates that mark this general Business English;6) Singapore Business English is not significantly influenced by the features of Singapore colloquial English in terms of syntax;7) Singapore Business English favors more active voice sentences in comparison with Brown Corpus;8) Singapore Business English tends to use more present continuous tense.Needless to say, the features of Singapore Business English in this thesis are highlighted in contrast with Brown Corpus and the conclusions are applicable to The Business Times in Singapore. Further studies can be conducted in the comparison between Singapore Business English and other English varieties.