A Corpus-based Study Of Collocation Of Business Description Words

A corpus-based study of collocation of business English lexis is graduallybeginning to hold a relatively important place in the field of linguistics. Compared withthe traditional investigation of business English lexis on the basis of researchers’intuition, the advantage of corpus method lies in its capacity to provide large, naturaldata and the power to re-order the language data with the aid of computer software,which enables the results to be more reliable and systematic. Right now the presentcorpus-based study on collocation at home mainly focus on general English lexis, butresearcher aboard have started to do more work on the ESP areas. Especially under thedrive of economic development, a corpus-based study of collocation of specificbusiness lexis have already achieved marked prospecting fruits and applied to businessarea successfully, which bring a new broad of perspective on significant theoretical andpractical value. So this thesis will analyze the collocation of business Englishdescription words on the basis of a corpus-based classification of BE lexis in previousresearch. We aim at providing a result and method reference for BE translation practice,BE teaching or learning and BE dictionary compilation, and on the other, thecorpus-based method for collocation of BE description words we adopted in this studymay also provide a reference for the systematic research of other lexis types in businessEnglish.With the guidance of Firth’s lexical composition theory, Mitchell’s structuralpattern theory and corpus-based approach, PolyU Business English Corpus as a tool, weretrieve ten BE description keywords and make a collocational study in terms of parts ofspeech, strength of collocation, collocational predictive and semantic prosody, concludetheir basic features on sentence structure, semantic and pragmatic in business context,the collocationability with place relations and frequency statistics of re-occurrence,especially try to find out some development trend characteristics in modern business inway of analyzing high frequency collocates.The thesis is divided into five chapters. Chapter one is an introduction whichpresents the general background of this study, including research contents, contentsarrangement, research objectives and research significance. Chapter Two is the literaturereview. This chapter reviews the study of corpus linguistic, collocation, then summarizethe previous corpus-based study of lexis collocation and BE lexis collocation. Chapter Three describes the theoretic framework and research methodology adopted in thisthesis. The theory of collocation, semantic prosody and corpus-based approach used inthis study are introduced in details. Chapter Four is the most important part of the thesis.Ten collected BE description words will be retrieved and statistically analyzed. ChapterFive provides conclusions for the present study, summarizing the major findings and thecontribution of the present study. Some implications, limitations and suggestions aredisplayed.According to research, we find that there is an enormous frequency differencebetween attribute and predicative description words served. Semantic collocates of thekeywords in this study are mainly technical words, semi-technical words and formalnon-technical words, in the business environment words that are normally very open intheir collocative potential become at least partially fixed. As to collocationability,description keywords are all right predicative and have been a progressive decrease inthe course of place, but in total the collocational strength of keywords is balanced.Finally, the findings show neutral semantic prosody dominates the ten business trendwords as eight of them have neutral semantic prosody. In a whole, the collocation of BEdescription words reflect marked business context features, that is different from generalEnglish collocation, which should attach more importance to BE translation practice,BE teaching practice and BE dictionary compilation.