The Language of Business Meetings

by Michael Handford

• ISBN13: 9780521116664
• ISBN10: 052111666X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2010-09-06
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

This innovative volume presents an in-depth study of the language used by participants in business meetings. The cutting-edge research draws on the Cambridge and Nottingham Business English Corpus (CANBEC), a unique resource which brings together meetings of different types both within and between companies, involving speakers whose roles and responsibilities vary, and who represent a range of nationalities and first languages. Keywords, concordance lines and discourse analysis provide thorough insights into aspects such as the structural stages of meetings, participants' discursive practices, interpersonal language and creativity, and power and constraint. The author concludes by making practical suggestions for using these findings to inform the teaching of business English.

Author Biography

Michael Handford is Associate Professor in English Language at the University of Tokyo, and a consultant for business communication.

Table of Contents

Series editors' preface	p. ix
Acknowledgements	p. xi
Transcription conventions	p. xiv
CANBEC: Corpus and context	p. 1
Data collection	p. 3
Corpus constituency	p. 7
Contextual information	p. 8
Transcription and anonymization	p. 15
Corpus size and generalizability	p. 18
Outline of the book	p. 19
References	p. 20
Background: Theory and methodology	p. 23
Theory	p. 25
Methodology	p. 37
Summary	p. 52
References	p. 53
The business-meeting genre: Stages and practices	p. 60
Applying Bhatia's multi-perspective model of discourse to business meetings	p. 62
The meeting matrix	p. 68
Applying the meeting matrix	p. 78
Summary	p. 88
References	p. 90
Significant meeting words: Keywords and concordances	p. 93
Institutional language and everyday English	p. 93
Lexico-grammatical theoretical considerations	p. 96
Word frequencies	p. 98
Keywords	p. 102
Summary	p. 113
References	p. 115
Discourse marking and interaction: Clusters and practices	p. 118
Defining clusters	p. 119
Clusters in business research	p. 122
Cluster lists	p. 125
Categorization of clusters	p. 131
Clusters in context	p. 137
Summary	p. 144
References	p. 146
Interpersonal language	p. 150
The transactional/relational linguistic distinction	p. 151
Pronouns	p. 155
Backchannels	p. 159
Vague language	p. 162
Hedges	p. 166
Deontic modality	p. 171
Summary	p. 178
References	p. 181
Interpersonal creativity: Problem, issue, if, and metaphors and idioms	p. 185
Problem and issue	p. 188
If	p. 195
Metaphors and idioms	p. 200
Summary	p. 213
References	p. 215
Turn-taking: Power and constraint	p. 218
Turn-taking in internal meetings	p. 222
Turn-taking in external meetings	p. 229
Summary	p. 241
References	p. 242
Teaching and learning implications	p. 245
Who is the learner?	p. 246
Teaching materials: What do they teach?	p. 250
How can a corpus such as CANBEC be exploited?	p. 253
Summary	p. 259
References	p. 261
Appendix	p. 265
Index	p. 266
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