Business English Collocations
Drd. Teodora POPESCU-FURNEA
Universitatea ” Babeş-Bolyai”, Cluj-Napoca
This paper addresses the issue of lexis in the Business English environment. We have tried
to analyse the way in which the acquisition of collocational patterns in English may contribute to
students’ better functioning in a business setting. We will also present the way in which the English
teacher may create his own teaching materials based on the principles of the lexical approach. We
will turn our attention to different online resources: the business press, specialist literature,
dictionaries, concordancers, and will provide some personal examples of vocabulary exercises
which concentrate on collocations.
Introduction
We will try in this paper to answer two important questions. Firstly, is the lexis of Business
English different from that of every day general English, and if yes, how can we best teach it to our
business students.
The importance of the command of business lexis for business people has been long known
and acknowledged. Business English represents one sub-division of ESP (English for Specific
Purposes), whose origins may be traced as far back as the Greek and Roman Empires (DudleyEvans & St. John, 1998:1). However, despite the long history of people’s need for specialist
knowledge of a foreign language, in order to fulfil pre-set de-limited tasks (business
correspondence, travelling abroad, etc.), it is safer to place the ESP movement in the second half of
the 20th century. The expansion of ESP is probably the result of two separate but related
developments: economic and educational. The rising economic imperialism of the USA has lead to
the need to communicate in English, mainly in the language of science and technology. The
educational change brought about an emphasis on learner-centeredness, and along with it a change
in how language and teaching were viewed.
The development of ESP has known several stages. These have been, in turn, Register
Analysis, Discourse or Rhetorical Analysis (which later developed the Genre Analysis approach),
Needs Analysis, Skills and Strategies; and the Learning-Centred approach. Underlying all these
approaches has been the issue whether specific situations where language is used can generate
situational or subject-specific language. There has been a consensus, that, while the situations do
not engender separate, special language per se, there is a restriction of language choice and a certain
amount of specialist lexis. The acquisition of this restricted, specialised language, by both teachers,
who need to teach it, and students, has created learning dynamic which is quite different from that
of general English.
The lexical approach
This new approach to language challenges the traditional view according to which
language is divided into grammar (structure) and vocabulary (words). “Instead, the
Lexical Approach argues that language consists of chunks which, when combined,
produce continuous coherent text.” (Lewis, 1997:7)
Michael Lewis defines the lexical approach as follows:
... the Lexical Approach places communication of meaning at the heart of language and
language learning. This leads to an emphasis on the main carrier of meaning,
vocabulary. The concept of a large vocabulary is extended from words to lexis, but the
essential idea is that fluency is based on the acquisition of a large store of fixed and
semi-fixed pre-fabricated items, which are available as the foundation for any linguistic
novelty or creativity.
(Lewis 1997:15)
According to the same author, language chunks are of different kinds, and he identifies four main
types:
a) Words:
a. stand-alone words (lexical items, words where a single substitution produces a
totally new meaning)
b. multi-word items (by the way, on the other hand)
b) Collocations: words co-occurring in natural text with greater than random frequency. They
may range from fully fixed (a broken home) through relatively fixed, to totally new.
c) Fixed expressions (social greetings – Good morning, Happy New Year, politeness phrases No, thank you, I’m fine, ‘Phrase Book’ language - Can you tell me the way to …………..,
please?, idioms - You’re making a mountain out of a molehill)
d) Semi-fixed expressions (almost fixed expressions – It’s/that’s not my fault, spoken sentences
with a simple slot – Could you pass ……….., please?, expressions with a slot which must be
filled with a particular kind of slot-filler – Hello. Nice to see you. I haven’t seen you + time
expression [for/since], sentence heads – What was really interesting / surprising / annoying
was …, more extended frames such as those for a formal letter or the opening paragraph of
an academic paper – In this paper I wish to suggest a third position…) (adapted from Lewis,
1997:7-11)
Collocations
We will try in the following to concentrate on the issue of collocation, and its relevance for the
study of business English. Although there is a vast literature on the subject, it is difficult to find a
precise definition of collocation. However, all definitions focus on the co-occurrence of words:
•
You shall know a word by the company it keeps.
(Firth 1957:179)
•
We may use the term node to refer to an item whose collocations we are studying, and we may
define a span as the number of lexical items on each side of a node that we consider relevant to that
node. Items in the environment set by the span we will call collocates.
(Sinclair 1966:415)
•
... the study of lexical patterns ...
•
... a sequence of words that occurs more than once in identical form .... and which is grammatically
well structured.
(Kjellmer 1987:133)
•
... the meaning of a word has a great deal to do with the words with which it commonly associates.
(Nattinger (1988:68)
(Brown 1974:1)
•
... a recurrent co-occurrence of words.
•
... the way individual words co-occur with others.
(Lewis 1993:93)
•
Collocates are the words which occur in the neighbourhood of your search word.
(Scott 1999 WordSmith Help File)
•
(Clear 1993:277)
... the way in which words occur together in predictable ways.
(Lewis & Hill 1998:1)
Collocation is central to the lexical approach. Hill (1999) suggests a possible extension to Hymes’
communicative competence by saying that ‘We are familiar with the concept of communicative
competence, but perhaps we should add the concept of collocational competence to our thinking’
(1999:5). Collocational competence is, therefore, considered a key factor in the lexical approach for
the learning of language. Studies by Bahns (1993) and Bahns & Eldaw (1993) point to the problems
students have when they are unable to successfully collocate. Their views are echoed by Hill (2000)
who observes that non-native speakers have problems ‘not because of faulty grammar but a lack of
collocations’ (Hill 2000:49).
In addition, Powell (1998), Williams (1998) and Morgan Lewis (2000), all stress the relationship of
knowledge of collocation and grammaticalisation. The fewer ready-made chunks of language a
speaker knows, the more they have to grammaticalise what they are trying to communicate. The
more students have to grammaticalise, the more likelihood there is of making language mistakes.
Morgan Lewis (2000:16) gives the example of the phrase major turning point. If a student doesn’t
know this phrase, they will have to paraphrase, e.g. a very important moment when things changed
completely, with the increased risk of making mistakes. There is also the danger of lexical
inappropriacy. Other such examples would be: vested interest - “a strong personal interest in
something because you could benefit from it“, or business acumen - “skill in making correct
decisions and judgments in business “.
Corpus linguistics
Corpus:

“the body of written or spoken material upon which a linguistic analysis is based“
(the OED)

a collection of texts assumed to be representative of a given language, dialect or other subset of a
language, to be used for linguistic analysis.“
(Francis 1982:7)

‘a large collection of written or spoken texts that is used for language research’
(the Collins COBUILD [1995] dictionary)
Concordance:

an alphabetical index of all the words in a text or corpus of texts, showing every contextual
occurrence of a word: a concordance of Shakespeare's works.
(http://dictionary.reference.com)

a list of the words used in a text or group of texts. The normal way of consulting a corpus is to look
at concordances which show words in the context in which they occur.
(http://www.macmillandictionary.com/resourcedicti
onaryterms.htm)
Concordancer:
•
a kind of search engine designed for language study. If you enter a word, it looks through a large
body of texts, called a corpus. This lets you look at a word in context, see how common it is, see the
style associated with it. Such a tool is computer-specific.
(http://www.usingenglish.com/glossary/concordancer.html)
Using corpora in linguistic analysis has been a rather debatable issue lately. Among the most
relevant advantages of computerized corpora, we might cite a just few: statistical objectivity
(Sinclair, 1991, Stubbs, 1996), verifiability of results (Svartvik, 1992), broadness of language able
to be represented (Svartvik, 1992), ready access (Svartvik, 1992), broad scope of analysis (Biber,
1995), accountability (Biber, 1995), reliability (Biber, 1995), pedagogic relevance (Johns, 1998;
Kennedy, 1992) and a view of all language and new perspectives ( Sinclair, 1991; Louw, 1993).
Nevertheless, there are also criticisms attached to it: focus on performance-related issues, leaving
aside aspects of language that are more concerned with competence (Howarth, 1998), exclusion of
intuition and common sense (Owen, 1993), problems related to size, representativeness and balance
of corpora (Renouf, 1987; Sinclair, 1991), Tribble, 1997), debate over the pedagogical usefulness of
frequency lists generated by corpora and the value of authentic materials for use in the classroom
(Widdowson, 1990; Howarth, 1998).
A personal experience
Our experience with creating corpora is quite limited, due to technical constrains, as we could not
create our own business English corpus. We had therefore resorted to the online resources, and we
used the free online dictionaries and concordancers in order to create a set of core business lexis,
organized around the lexical approach principle. We grouped words according to the grammatical
category they most frequently collocate with. Thus, a word like ability is presented as follows:
ABILITY
n the skill or talent to do or perform sth successfully
V: appraise, assess, demonstrate, develop, encourage, evaluate, foster, have, measure, over/underrate, recognise, use ~
A: artistic, average, competitive, creative, data storage, decision-making, earning, entrepreneurial, exceptional,
executive, fund-raising, great, inferior, innate, innovative, language, latent, leadership, learning, legal, managerial,
mental, moderate, natural, outstanding, physical, remarkable, striking, superior, uncanny, unique, working ~
P: ~ test, to assert oneself, to communicate well, to invest, to lead, to meet financial obligations, to pay, to repay, to
work under pressure, to work in a team; test of ~ies
We will try in the following to give a brief account of the resources and strategies we used in order
to create the “Business Collocations: English-Romanian Dictionary.
Let us turn our attention to the word business. This will be found in the MSN Encarta
dictionary, in the following combinations: the retail business, ailing ~, poor ~, take over a ~, do ~
with sb, etc.
Similarly, we might find in Cambridge dictionaries online the following structures: big, monkey,
show ~; ~ class, end, park, plan; be in ~, get down to ~, etc.
A bilingual dictionary (dict.leo.org) might prove just as useful: be away on ~, be out on ~,
open, abandon, attend to a ~.
Concordancers will also provide us with plenty of frequent collocations. Thus, the concordances
generated by the Corpus Brown software, will add further collocations to our list: private, public,
motel ~, come on ~, etc.
Another rich resource is the Web Concordancer, which might provide us with other useful
examples: local ~; experience in ~; ~ firm, manager, etc.
Once the dictionary has been created, the next step was to find ways in which to teach these
collocations to our business students. One of the strategies we used was to find authentic business
materials, taken especially from the online business press, which we turned into vocabulary practice
exercises.
In the following, we will present a business article that we exploited from a lexical point of view.
We extracted from the text some common collocations and starting from these, we created a
matching exercise:
Match the following verbs and nouns to form suitable collocations:
1. make
2. reach
3. return
4. ask for
5. state
6. do
7. burn
8. end
9. express
10. take
11. handle
12. make
a)
b)
c)
d)
e)
f)
g)
h)
i)
j)
k)
l)
bridges
a/the call
an interest
a deal
a/the call
business
a message
a number
a/the call
an appointment
a/the call
the purpose
The next step is for the students to re-create the text, out of which the above collocations were
extracted:
Now fill in the gaps in the following text with the collocations you found above. You may want to change the form of
the verbs (-ing, -ed, etc.) or of the nouns (pl., etc.):
Business Telephone Etiquette for Success
Proper Telephone Etiquette is more important than ever in today’s business environment. Much of our business
communications takes place on the phone: in the office, at home, in the car, virtually anywhere. In this area, proper
phone technique can 1. ________or break _______ or relationships. The following are some guidelines to help you use
the phone as a power tool.
First is the greeting. When answering the phone for business, be sure to identify yourself (and your company, if
applicable). If answering someone else’s line, be sure to include their name in your greeting, so that the other party does
not think they have 2. ________ a wrong ________. For example, if answering Jim Smith’s line, Bob Johnson would
answer the phone “Jim Smith’s line, Bob Johnson speaking” and then 3. _________ ________ or 4. ________
_________, depending on how your office works.
When you are the person 5. _______ _______, be sure to use proper phone etiquette from the start. You want to be sure
to be polite to the “gatekeepers” i.e. Secretaries, receptionists etc. that answer the phone for your business contact, as
they are the ones who have the power put you through, (or not) at 4:55 pm on Friday, when their boss is getting ready to
leave the office. They may sit outside of the office, but they too have influence and power so a greeting such as “Good
morning, this is Penny Jones, I’m 6. _______ _______from John Jones, is he available? is a bit of etiquette well spent
in the long run. It would also be wise to learn the names of the top assistants, and use their names to make them feel
noticed and important. Some business relationships, especially in fields like sales and marketing, start or stall right at
the front desk.
When you have reached the party, if your call has been expected, remind them of the prior conversation and
appointment. People get busy and can seem surprised until you remind them of where they should remember you from.
If your call is not expected, unless it will be a short call, ask the party if they have the time for you. Calling
unannounced is much like “dropping in” and you shouldn’t overstay unless invited. If the other person does not have
time, briefly 7. __________ __________ of your call and 8. __________ ___________ to follow up at a later time.
Have a phone diary. Keep a pencil and pad near the phone and jot notes during phone conversations. This will help you
“actively listen” and have a reference for later. Employ active listening noises such as “yes” or “I see” or “great”. This
lets the other person know that you care about what they have to say. Recap at the end of the call, using your notes and
repeat any resolutions or commitments on either side to be sure you are both “on the same page”.
9. __________ _________ on a positive note by thanking the other person for their time and 10. _________
_________ in speaking with them again (if that is true). If not, just let them know you appreciated them speaking with
you and end the call. A gracious good bye leaves the door open for further communication and in this day of mergers
and acquisitions you never know with whom you will 11. _________ ________ with in the future, so 12. ________
any ___________, or telephone lines, would be unwise. Remember, in this global marketplace, some of the most
powerful business relationships have been between people who have never seen each other.
(http://ny.essortment.com/businesstelepho_rtli.htm)
Other types of exercises may be created, as well. Another example would be the selection of
collocations that might occur in the context of a certain business situation, such as finding a job.
Thus, we selected a few recurrent expressions found in job advertisements and letters of
applications and we generated the following matching exercise:
Find below some useful collocations that may be found in job advertisements and letters of application:
a)
b)
shortlist
apply for
abilities
applicant
add to
attend
demonstrate
demonstrate
verbs
pursue
live on
verbs
acumen
job
provide
negotiate
earn
undertake
career
knowledge
acquire
organisational
tenured
fringe
candidates
benefits
high-calibre
high
advanced
private
adjectives
attractive
competitive
commitment
redundancy
attractive
hands-on
working
business
adjectives
promising
successful
experience
performance
total
managerial
in-depth
degree
money
skills
appraisal
expectations
advancement
description
incentive
phrases
salary
holder
package
phrases
scheme
entitlement
interview
pension
The examples may continue, and we consider that teachers themselves may put their imagination
and creativity to use and come up with useful lexical practice for their students. It is nevertheless, of
extreme importance, to find those collocations that are indeed most frequent in the business lexis
and the knowledge of which may contribute to students’ better functioning in a business-related
context.
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