Series editors' preface

Summary

This book makes a substantial contribution to the growing body of research on business communication. It uses a unique spoken corpus, the Cambridge and Nottingham Business English Corpus (CANBEC), to study the language of business meetings.

Business meetings are an important part of ordinary working life for many people, and these meetings take place, increasingly frequently, in English. They are not the easiest of situations to study. Meetings are often confidential, may include a large number of people, and frequently involve discussion of people, events and values that are referred to in inexplicit terms. They also vary considerably depending on factors such as the size of the company, the purpose of the meeting and the relationships of the people involved. Obtaining recordings of meetings, then, necessitates a personal relationship with the organization concerned, both to establish trust and to gain an understanding of the issues and relationships that are important in each meeting event. It is difficult to satisfy these requirements and still collect the large quantity of varied data that a detailed study of business meetings needs.

As principal researcher on the CANBEC project, Dr Michael Handford succeeded in collecting one million words from a variety of business contexts. This is a corpus large enough to make authoritative statements about language frequency, but small enough for the author to have familiarity with each of the texts in it and the relationship with the producers of the texts, as mentioned above.