How a corpus-based study of the factors which influence collocation can help in the teaching of business English

In this paper I use two case studies to show how corpus linguistics can be used to help in the teaching of business English. Senior managers in global companies often find themselves having to do their job in a foreign language. Given that language is one of the key tools of management, the senior managers are normally very keen to develop a sophisticated command of what they perceive to be key lexis. Consequently, the business English teacher may be required to answer searching and demanding questions in a very precise and accurate way. In this paper I show how a corpus-based investigation of the collocational behaviour of key lexis can be used to answer many of these questions. For example, a study of this kind can reveal the different senses of a word and show how it may be associated with a particular semantic prosody. By studying the collocations associated with a group of so-called synonyms it is often possible to identify slight but significant differences in the meaning of the words in the group.

Research highlights
► Collocational behaviour can often be explained by looking at how collocations are formed.
► Studying collocations associated with near synonyms can reveal how they differ in meaning.
► The collocates of a word will often reflect its prosody and its different senses.