The Language of Business Meetings

by Michael Handford

• ISBN13: 9780521133432
• ISBN10: 0521133432
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2010-09-20
• 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.

Table of Contents

Series editors' preface

Acknowledgements

Transcription conventions

CANBEC: corpus and context

Data collection

Corpus constituency

Contextual information

Transcription and anonymization

Corpus size and generalizability

Outline of the book

References

Background: theory and methodology

Theory

Methodology

Summary

References

The business-meeting genre: stages and practices

Applying Bhatia's multi-perspective model of discourse to business meetings

The meeting matrix

Applying the meeting matrix

Summary

References

Significant meeting words: keywords and concordances

Institutional language and everyday English

Lexico-grammatical theoretical considerations

Word frequencies

Keywords

Summary

References

Discourse marking and interaction: clusters and practices

Defining clusters

Clusters in business research

Cluster lists

Categorization of clusters

Clusters in context

Summary

References

Interpersonal language: pronouns, backchannels, vague language, hedges and deontic modality

The transactional/relational linguistic distinction

Pronouns

Backchannels

Vague language

Hedges

Deontic modality

Summary

References

Interpersonal creativity: problem, issue, if, and metaphors and idioms

Problem and issue

If

Metaphors and idioms

Summary

References

Turn-taking: power and constraint

Turn-taking in internal meetings

Turn-taking in external meetings

Summary

References

Teaching and learning implications

Who is the learner?

Teaching materials: what do they teach?

How can a corpus such as CANBEC be exploited?

Summary

References

Appendix

Index

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