The Language of Business Meetings

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. Key features The content of the book is taken from unique research based on a unique corpus of business meetings -the Cambridge and Nottingham Spoken Business English Corpus (CANBEC). The author of the book is also the main constructor of the corpus and is therefore an expert on both the research and the data on which the research was based. The amount of contextual and relational information used by Handford during analysis makes the findings more representative than any other publication of 'real' business meeting situations.